Consfcience 

Wiitti topical examples bp 

James; ^fjinnep iWunroe 




Class jt:4i51 

Book 



-i^t^ 



Copyright 1^°. 



/ 



COPyRIGHT DEPOSm 




«h^ 



Jonathan Edwards 

I li'^li-Prics/ of the Nciu Enghnul (Conscience 



The 
New England Conscience 

With Typical Examples by 

JAMES PHINNEY MUNROE 

Author of "The Educational Ideal," "New 
Demands in Education," "Adventures of an 
.Irmy Nurse." "The Munro Clan" Etc. 




Printed by RICHARD G. BADGER 

at The Gorham Press and sold by him 

at 194 BoYLSTON Street, BOSTON, and 

by all Vendors of choice Books 



Copyright, 1915, by Richard G. Badger 



^^ All Rights Reserved 

I' 6^ 



.M^M 



The portrait of Abraham Lincoln facing page 156 
is used through the kind permission of The Macmil- 
lan Company, publisher of "Abraham Lincoln, the 
Man of the People,'" by Norman Hapgood, in which 
it first appeared. 



The Gorham Press, Boston, U. S. A. 



HFC 17 1915 

©b!A416916 



rt CONTENTS 

Page 

I. The New England Conscience 9 

7; 

II. Samuel Adams: The New England 

Democrat I9 

III. The Town of Lexington 43 

IV. Josiah Quincy: The New England 

Aristocrat 59 

V. The Shays Rebellion 89 

VI. Destruction of the Ursuline Convent 

at Charlestown, Massachusetts ... 117 

VII. Theodore Parker 140 

VIII. Abraham Lincoln 148 

IX. The Heart of the United States 163 

X. The Eternal Feminine 184 

XI. Madame de Maintenon 201 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 

Rev. Jonathan Edwards, D. D. Frontispiece 

{From an original portrait by Moultrop) 

Facing Page 

Samuel Adams 20 

{From the painting by Copley, in the pos- 
session of Harvard University) 

Hon. Josiah Quincy • . 60 

{From the painting by Gilbert Stuart, in 
the possession of the Museum of Fine 
Arts. Boston) 

Ruins of the Charlestown Convent, with Old 

Middlesex Canal in foreground 128 

{From an old painting) 

Rev. Theodore Parker 140 

{From the lithograph by Grozelier, made 
from a daguerreotype by L. M. Ives) 

Abraham Lincoln 1 56 

{From a negative made at Springfield, III., 
June, i860, by Alexander Hesler of Chi- 
cago. Owned by Mr. George B. Ayres 
of Philadelphia) 

Madame de Maintenon and the Duchess of 

Burgundy 202 

{From a woodcut after the painting by 
Mignard) 



THE NEW ENGLAND CONSCIENCE 



THE 

New England 
Conscience 

I 

The New England Conscience 

THE old New England Conscience was 
an admirable selective force, picking out 
the ruggedest from the English stock, 
strengthening it by a fight against the 
wilderness, proscribing from contact 
with it all idleness, ungodliness and frivolity. A 
good means to an important end, but in itself an ill- 
favored thing. Economizing and concentrating the 
forces necessary to found America, it was narrow as 
avarice, morbid as egoism. It exalted harsh, un- 
lovely deeds into Heaven-inspired acts, and was blind 
to all human purposes but death. Those early New 
Englanders, condemning the symbols of formalism, 
were slaves to form. Their spiritual life was a 
ceaseless ceremonial, their pious observances were 
rigid rules of etiquette without which one could 
obtain neither favor nor even audience of the 
Almighty. 

This spirit of caste, largely induced by their geo- 
graphical Isolation, kept our ancestors "not provincial 
but parochial." It fostered a condition of life and 
a type of character doubtless never again to be possi- 
9 



lo Neiv England Conscience 



ble in the world's history. Having done its work, 
having founded soundly and peopled strongly an ex- 
ceptional region, the New England conscience had 
no further necessity of being. Those whom it now 
tortures with its hot pincers of doubt and self-re- 
proach are sacrificed to a cause long since won. It 
is not now, as it was in Edwards' time, "a common 
Thing, that Persons have had such a Sense of their 
own Sinfulness, that they have thought themselves 
to be the worst of all, and that none ever was so 
vile as they." On the contrary, the modern ten- 
dency is to envelop one's self and all one's neighbors 
in a broad mantle of indiscriminating charity. 
' The genuine New England conscience, therefore, 
is becoming as rare as those Saurian monsters whose 
lonely survivals occasionally affright the sailor. It 
is no less an anachronism than the formal, man- 
nered speech in which its dread decisions were em- 
bodied. Both demanded leisure, and haste is the 
dominant characteristic of to-day. The not-yet- 
forgotten packet boats, favored by winds and cur- 
rents, sometimes crossed the turbulent Atlantic in 
two weeks. We, burning five daily three-hundred 
tons of coal, follow a great circle straight from shore 
to shore and call ourselves landed when we sight 
the outermost beacon. Having made the discovery 
that luxury — the material reward of life — is mainly 
a question of transportation, we are striving to an- 
nihilate time and space. We put the tropics on 
wheels to stimulate our palates, fling ourselves 
around the world for a summer's holiday, and dream 
of seeing and hearing Covent Garden by cable. 



The New England Conscience 1 1 



Our years, if we care to make them so, are Cathay 
cycles with the tedium distilled aw'ay. Already we 
are launching aerial ships and are turning inquisi- 
tive, neighborly eyes towards Mars. The insoluble 
mysteries of yesterday are the schoolboy's reading- 
lesson of to-day; and the Land of the Anthropo- 
phagi is the picnic-ground of the tourist. The mean- 
est among us must have such a stock of common 
knowledge as, a century ago, would have made a 
brave show at college. Our careers must start at 
a point where those of many of our ancestors ended. 
Their anxious, year-long problems have become our 
five-minute hesitations, their crises — two or three 
in a lifetime — our daily experiences. Americans are 
now not only of the world, they are of a world that 
knows and avails itself of steam and electricity, that 
finds the air too dull a medium for intercommunica- 
tion and seeks to use in place of it the subtler ethers. 

Moreover, we have emerged not only from 
bucolic, but also from national isolation. We have 
substituted the demi-tasse for pie. While Ameri- 
cans stood like village gossips measuring one another 
with eyes of censure, having no standards beyond 
their own pettiness, they were forced into hy- 
pocrisy, were abnormally sensitive, pharisaical, bom- 
bastic. They had no choice but to walk in the path 
of tradition, a path, unfortunately, which led back 
to the wilderness days when there was little except 
toil, bitter privation, narrow interests, no joy in 
life. Treading this narrow road, our forebears 
dared not play, dared scarcely think of a world dif- 
ferent from that in which thev found themselves. 



12 New England Conscience 



lest through these heresies they should incur the 
reproach of being un-American. 

Within the past fifty years we have broken 
through the imaginary hedges which shut us out 
from so much of the brightness and freedom of ex- 
istence. Within the next twenty-five years we shall 
have become the most cosmopolitan country in the 
world. Adaptable, vigorous, acute, we have made 
that difficult first trespass upon the territory of 
civilizations older, richer, in many ways better than 
ours, and it will require but another generation for 
us to invade every corner of them, appropriating all 
that can make us happier and that can add to our 
wealth in those things of life which endure. 

Because we are subjugating nature and living 
somewhat at ease, are we therefore materialistic or, 
as Carlyle will have it, swinish? Rather were we 
such in being slaves, as swine are, to the grosser 
elements of nature. Because we are living rapidly 
and richly are we therefore reckless? Rather were 
we lumpish in not learning the secrets that govern 
time and space. Because the work time diminishes 
and the play time increases, and even work, with 
some wise souls, is becoming a sort of play, are we 
therefore frivolous and spendthrift? Rather a thou- 
sand times spendthrift were we in wasting and abus- 
ing this gift of life in hard, dismal labor, unblessed 
by a glimpse of the paradise of true pleasure whose 
unbarred gate we refused even to push open. 

In this process of great change, however, the 
America of the newspapers is, without question, 
flauntingly materialistic. That it should be so tern- 



The New England Conscience 13 



porarily is wholly natural; that it should remain so 
is utterly beyond belief. For there are new forces 
every day growing, strengthening and taking defi- 
nite shape which are certain to counteract the per- 
vading materalism of modern life. Those forces are 
the new conscience, which localizes heaven and hell 
within the individual instead of beyond the stars; 
the new religion of service which finds His work 
waiting to be done on every street corner; and the 
new gospel, that of physical, mental and spiritual 
->implicity. 

This modern type of conscience has developed new 
concepts of religion. Our churches may be emptier 
of worshippers than when the tythingman held le- 
gal sway; but our streets and houses and offices are 
fuller of the real presence of God. The women's 
clubs, the men's gatherings, the various social or- 
ganizations of which every American hamlet has at 
least one are, most of them, when viewed too closely, 
rather absurd ; looked at in the aggregate, however, 
they are magnificent. For they signalize the final 
emancipation of New England and the New England 
spirit from the reign of that selfish individualism 
which sought only its own salvation. The modern 
individualists, with their flaunting of vulgar wealth, 
with their disregard of others' rights, with their le- 
gal and illegal grasping of everything within their 
reach, hold still, of course, the centre of the stage; 
but the real work of civilization is being done by 
those thousands and tens of thousands who, wit- 
tingly or unwittingly, are laboring for each other 
and for the uplifting of the world. 



14 New England Conscience 

One of the most inspiring of books is that of Dar- 
win upon earth-worms, wherein he shows that were 
it not for the making of leaf-mold and the stirring of 
the soil by these multitudinous, industrious crea- 
tures, the earth would yield no crops, and animals 
— and therefore man — would starve. We would 
like to feel ourselves under the guardianship of the 
stars; instead we must bow the knee to these poor, 
blind creatures whom we scarcely deign to use as 
bait for fish. We would like to believe that we are 
really governed by our elected rulers, we would like 
to think that our fashions are set by dukes and their 
millionaire duchesses, we would like to imagine that 
every step forward in civilization is taken by some 
panoplied St. George, declaiming in the limelight 
and running vice through its scaly body with the vis- 
ible, triumphant sword of virtue. But it is better 
for us, it is better for the world that the real forces 
of society, of politics, of civilization are humble, si- 
lent, hidden, like the earth-worms, but, like them, 
are ceaselessly busy in making an ever stronger and 
richer moral soil for mankind. 

We are fed daily in the press upon the short- 
comings, vanities and corruptions of federal and 
state officials ; but we hear almost nothing of those 
obscurer servants of the government who are work- 
ing everyv^'here throughout the ramifications of the 
Republic, — this one protecting the public health, 
that one developing the national resources, the third 
opening a pathway for enlightenment, and all serv- 
ing, not mechanically for mere pay, but zealously 
and eagerly for the upbuilding of a higher civiliza- 



The New England Conscience 15 



tion for America. We learn in letters six inches 
high when a millionaire divorces his wife or amuses 
himself in some other way; but we do not learn 
when this mother makes some great sacrifice for her 
children, when that father refuses to perjure him- 
self lest he bring shame to his sons, when Smith, 
Brown and Robinson get together determined to 
make the little spot on which they live a better 
place. We know from iterated and reiterated 
"muck-raking" how much is stolen, squandered and 
given in bribes in our vast, extravagant cities; but 
we have almost no way of finding out that the same 
slums which are supposed to breed these evil con- 
ditions are filled with men and women who love their 
adopted country, who are proud of their city and 
who would like to have it the boast rather than the 
shame of America, but who do not know how as yet 
to fight against evils the causes of which they can- 
not comprehend. We know some truth and much 
fiction about the rascals in political life — for it is the 
delight of the rascals who are out to throw a search- 
light upon the rascals who are in — but we are ignor- 
ant of those knots of men and women who are stead- 
ily, silently and unselfishly busy in influencing this 
group, in educating that neighborhood, in purifying 
and training public opinion so that next week, or 
next year, or in the next decade, it will demand and 
will enforce reform. To-day such a group of re- 
formers is ten "cranks" against a thousand con- 
servative citizens ; some day in the certain future, 
however, it will be a thousand citizens against ten 
reactionaries; and that particular moral or social 



1 6 New England Conscience 

battle will have been won. Meanwhile that first 
ten will have broken into units with new points ot 
attachment and with new — still silent — ways of 
progressing towards some higher vantage ground of 
morality and truth. 

The modern conscience being straightforward and 
business-like, we are eschewing casuistry; social ser- 
vice being the plain doing of the next thing to be 
done, we are growing ashamed of pretense and ar- 
tificiality. We are resolving life, therefore, into its 
elements and are finding the highest civilization to 
be synonymous with the purest simplicity. The 
shut-in, conventional, censorious, morally dyspeptic 
existence of earlier America is being transformed 
into the out-door living, toleration, friendliness and 
genuine democracy of to-day. But our consciences 
-^till demand much training, our working-together 
still requires to be educated out of the benumbing 
influences of long generations of isolation, the rank 
and file of us must still be taught by experience the 
true meaning and practice of simplicity. Above all, 
we Americans, and especially we New Englanders, 
need to learn how to relax. 

A real art is that of relaxation. One to be re- 
garded soberly, studied earnestly, and taught as a 
part of youthful education. Most men are as ig- 
norant of the laws of pleasure as they are of those 
of health, and weary themselves with sham joys 
that, secretly, they loathe. Thence arises, in no 
small measure, that artificiality, insincerity, and vul- 
gar pretense which obtrude themselves alike at the 
magnificent "function" and at the humble "socia- 



The New England Conscience IJ 



ble." So-called Society, whether it be of the city or 
of the hamlet, is too self-conscious to relax; but its 
votaries must have some relief, and upon them na- 
ture revenges herself by leading them into the wild- 
est excesses and most extravagant inanities. 

The inability of the average American to ex- 
tract even a portion of its normal, rational pleasure 
from his life befogs the judgment of the visiting 
foreigner and blinds him to what is superlatively 
good in this work-ridden, life-wasting United States. 
It seems to him that the huddled villas of Newport 
and the crowding booths of Coney Island must com- 
pletely measure our civilization. He sees every- 
where among us so much beauty and so little real 
pleasure in the beautiful, so much spending and so 
little true value gained, so much boasting of freedom 
and such slavery to false and ridiculous conventions. 
But the traveler who, noting these surface defici- 
encies, calls us savages, is wholly wrong. We possess 
all the elements of refinement excepting only that 
one which has been our leading boast, — simplicity. 
In escaping from the old New England conscience 
we have for a time run away from the fundamental 
principles of social duty; in entering into the liberty 
of genuine civilization we have become entangled 
temporarily in the meshes of cosmopolitan license. 
It is wholesome, therefore, occasionally to go back 
and to seek, by study of men and events, the deep- 
lying moral causes of the unquestioned power and 
leadership of this small Northeastern corner of the 
United States. 

The essential power of New England, and of 



New England Conscience 



New Englanders, has always been the force of rug- 
ged simplicity. The men who won the Revolu- 
tionary War, the men who saved the Union, were 
above all simple men, doing their work in a straight- 
forward way. The spiritual and literary leaders 
of New England, no less, were men and women of 
direct speech and unartificial living. 

The new New England Conscience, if it is to do 
great deeds, must meet the complex problems 
of the twentieth with the single-heartedness of the 
eighteenth century; must choose as its leaders, such 
direct, straightforward men as those who won the 
Revolutionary War and who saved the Union to 
which that War gave birth. Therefore it seems 
worth w^hile to take up, even though in a desultory 
way, a few of the events, and to examine a few of 
the men in which and in whom the New England 
spirit and the New England conscience seem 
to have played a leading and compelling part. 
Behind the New England spirit is, however, 
the eternal spirit due to the feminine prin- 
ciple ; and, if it seems a long way from New Eng- 
land to Versailles, the space is only that of geo- 
graphy. Temperamentally and in matters of con- 
science, Mme. de Maintenon was conspicuously of 
the New England type. 



Samuel Adams: New England Democrat 19 

II 

Samuel Adams: The New England Democrat 

WE very properly call Washington the 
Father of his Country; but the real 
Founder of these United States was 
not Washington — it was Samuel 
Adams. It is doubtful if we could 
have won in the Revolutionary War without the 
lofty courage and wise generalship of Washington ; 
it is doubtful if the United States could have weath- 
ered the still harder period following the Revolu- 
tion had it not been for the strength and wisdom 
of the first President. But it is also doubtful if we 
would have had a Revolutionary War at all — and 
therefore a field for Washington's great qualities — 
had it not been for the tireless efforts and the 
extraordinary^ skill and power of Samuel Adams, 
who, John Fiske says, should stand second only to 
Washington as the greatest of Americans. Boston 
led the movement against the arbitrary' rule of 
Great Britain; but it was Sam Adams who led 
Boston. Boston stirred up Massachusetts and the 
other colonies to resist taxation ; but it was Sam 
Adams who stirred up Boston. And he did this 
not by eloquence and fiery speech-making — for he 
was no orator; he stirred up Boston, he stirred up 
Massachusetts, he stirred up all the colonies by 
letters to the newspapers, by correspondence, vo- 
luminous and fiery, most of all by resolutions passed 



20 New England Conscience 



in that greatest political institution which America 
ever possessed or ever will possess, — the New Eng- 
land town-meeting. 

It is superfluous to describe the principles and 
methods of the town-meeting; but perhaps we do 
not always remember what a perfect instrument for 
the teaching and preservation of democracy that 
town-meeting has been and still is, and how much 
the city youth and man loses in not having an op- 
portunity to watch the machinery of government, 
to debate public questions and to interrogate, face 
to face, the officials under whose rule he lives. I 
have no hesitation in saying that the moulders of 
America have been, not its Presidents, Governors 
and other great dignitaries, but those humble though 
powerful oflBfcials called Moderators, who are sworn 
to show no favor in conducting the town-meeting, 
and who must let the meanest and poorest citizen 
express his views as freely and lengthily as he 
chooses, provided only he keeps within hailing dis- 
tance of the question before the house. 

One hundred and fifty years ago, however, the 
towns in Massachusetts were even more democratic 
than they are today; for the people of that time not 
only settled, in their town-meetings, such questions 
as they do at present; they also decided who should 
be the minister and how much (or, rather, how lit- 
tle) salary he should be paid. As a consequence, 
the citizens grew into the habit of discussing all 
kinds of questions about church government, morals, 
and religion, and were accustomed, therefore, to 
look at every civic and political problem from Its eth- 




Samuel Adams 



Samuel Adams: New England Democrat 21 



ical as well as from its material side. But there was 
still another function exercised by those old town- 
meetings which has long since passed into oblivion, 
— that of taking direct part in the work of the Gen- 
eral Court. For in those earlier days the legislature 
was regarded by the towns of Massachusetts simply 
as a sort of joint town-meeting, and the representa- 
tives sent to the General Court were instructed, by 
formal resolutions of the town, how they should 
vote on all important questions. 

These facts are essential to an understanding of 
the action of the colonies in the ten or twelve years 
before the Battle of Lexington : the facts that the 
people at that time had been educated by one hun- 
dred and twenty-five years of town-meetings to 
manage their own affairs through the most perfect 
form of democratic government ever devised ; that 
those colonial meetings were practically free from all 
supervision by the British government; that those 
town gatherings considered not only the affairs of 
daily life, but also great moral questions; and that 
they took an active part in the business of the whole 
commonwealth by instructing their representatives 
to the General Court how to vote upon every large 
measure affecting the whole colony. 

I have said that the towns of Massachusetts were 
perfect democracies; but I should have excepted 
Boston. There was a world of difference between 
the town governments of Massachusetts and the 
superimposed colonial rule ; and Boston, as the seat 
of his Majesty's government for Massachusetts, was 
filled with crown officers, with military men, with 



22 New England Conscience 



rich merchants having intimate relations with the 
mother-country, and with younger sons of the no- 
bility sent over here to make a living. So in Bos- 
ton there was a large and very powerful aristocracy 
wholly in sympathy with British rule; and the con- 
test there in the eleven years, 1764 to 1775, was not 
only one between the colonists and the mother-coun- 
try, but a contest between Democracy as represented 
by the Town Meeting, and Aristocracy as repre- 
sented by most of the wealthy merchants and con- 
spicuous officials. 

The Boston of that day did not rest mainly upon 
piles; it was a narrow, but solid, peninsula extend- 
ing into the harbor, and it possessed no houses 
higher than three stories. Therefore the few public 
buildings, such as Faneuil Hall, the Old State 
House and the Old South Meeting House, loomed 
up as prominent objects visible from everywhere. 
Metaphorically, too, those three buildings stand 
forth as great landmarks in American history, for 
in one or the other of them took place almost all 
the famous scenes of the opening of the Revolution- 
ary War. 

In one end of the Old State House met the Pro- 
vincial Assembly, or General Court, and at the other 
end met the Governor and his Council; in Faneuil 
Hall assembled the ordinary town-meetings of Bos- 
ton; but when there was any particularly exciting 
meeting — and there were many in those ten years 
before 1775 — Faneuil Hall was not big enough; so 
they would adjourn to the Old South Meeting 
House, and the thousands of overwrought towns- 



Samuel Adams: New England Democrat 23 

people would come sweeping up through what are 
now Adams Square and Washington Street, and 
would surge into that building, until every corner 
upon the floor and in the galleries was filled. 

In this old town where everybody knew every- 
body else, and in those lively old town-meetings 
where everybody felt free to speak his mind, Sam- 
uel Adams played his great part as the stirrer-up 
and leader of the Revolution. 

Samuel Adams was not born a poor boy, though 
he was always a poor man. His father was one of 
the leading citizens of Boston, and his grandfather 
was brother to the grandfather of John Adams. 
Samuel was born in 1722 in a good house on Pur- 
chase Street, with a beautiful garden stretching 
down to the harbor, and having a fine view of 
Massachusetts Bay. The boy went to Harvard, 
was graduated when he was eighteen, and wanted 
to study law ; but law not being considered a very 
respectable occupation in those days, his parents 
forbade it and tried to turn a man who would have 
been a wonderfully good advocate into what proved 
to be a very unsuccessful merchant. The young 
man had no taste for this, kept losing money and 
losing more money until, finally, with the little that 
was left, he and his father set up a malt house in 
their garden on Purchase Street. This was fairly 
successful for a while; but this was not considered 
very respectable either; and in later years Adams' 
enemies took great pleasure in calling him "Sam the 
Maltster." 

Probably the main reason why the Adamses — 



24 New England Conscience 



father and son — did not succeed better in a material 
way was because they were far more interested in 
town affairs than in their own concerns. We find 
Samuel Adams serving on many town committees 
and as moderator of town-meetings for a number 
of years; but, singularly enough, he did not become 
really prominent until he was forty-two. In those 
days a man of that age was considered venerable, 
and Adams, moreover, carried out that view, for his 
hair was quite grey and he had a trembling of the 
head and hands which, while it added impressive- 
ness to his public speaking, made him seem much 
older than he was. He had been contributing letters 
to the newspapers for a number of years — the kind 
of letter signed Veritas, Senex, etc., which made up 
the greater substance of those pre-Revolutionary 
journals — but his first writing of consequence was 
a document prepared for a town-meeting, a docu- 
ment which was adopted, protesting against the pro- 
posed Stamp Act. This paper is important in be- 
ing the first formal statement ever made by the Col- 
onies that Parliament had no right to tax them, 
and in containing the very first suggestion that the 
Colonies get together to secure redress. 

In the fall of that year, 1764, he was elected 
a member of the Provincial Assembly or General 
Court, and almost immediately he — together with 
James Otis — became the leader in those stirring 
times. In the following May (1765) Adams was 
re-elected to the General Court, the other three 
members from Boston being Thomas Cushing (long- 
time Speaker of the House), John Hancock and 



Samuel Adams: New England Democrat 25 



James Otis. At this session Adams was elected 
Clerk of the House, and the annual salary of one 
hundred pounds was about all that he and his family 
had to live on for a number of years. 

Meanwhile the Stamp Act had been repealed; 
but the British government, pretending to believe 
that it was the kind of tax, not the fact of being 
taxed, that the colonies objected to, proposed to 
put other taxes upon paper, glass, painters' colors 
and tea. Worse than that, however, they proposed 
to use the money from these taxes for giving regular 
salaries to the governors, judges, and other officers 
appointed by the King, who, theretofore, had been 
dependent upon the votes of the Provincial As- 
semblies. This the colonies did not like at all, 
and every manner of wild suggestion was advanced. 
A sensible plan of resistance, however, and one that 
met with popular favor, was made by Samuel Adams 
that the colonies should stop importing English goods 
and should establish manufactures of their own. 
At his suggestion town-meetings were held through- 
out Massachusetts to arouse the people against us- 
ing British goods and to encourage the starting of 
domestic industries. 

The Massachusetts Assembly prepared various 
documents, most of which Sam Adams wrote, in 
relation to these taxes. Among them was a petition 
to the King; and when Mr. Adams had finished 
writing it, his daughter said, "In a few weeks that 
paper will be touched by the royal hand." "More 
likely," replied her father, "it will be spumed by 
the royal foot." The document which made the 



26 New England Conscience 



most stir, however, was a so-called "Circular Let- 
ter" sent by the Massachusetts Assembly to the 
other colonies, urging them to work together to 
devise some means of making the mother country 
listen to their complaints and grievances. This Cir- 
cular Letter so angered the King and his ministers 
that they ordered Governor Bernard to dissolve the 
General Court and not to let it meet again until it 
should agree to withdraw the obnoxious letter. Not 
only did the General Court, before dissolving, vote 
not to withdraw the letter, but town meetings were 
everywhere held upholding the members and making 
very vigorous protest against taxation without rep- 
resentation. The King's government, therefore, de- 
termined to break the spirit of the colonies by for- 
bidding town-meetings, by having such leaders as 
Adams and Otis arrested, and by sending troops to 
overawe the people. When the mother country took 
such violent action as this, Adams foresaw that rec- 
onciliation would be impossible, and from that mo- 
ment, he afterwards said, he began to work night 
and day for the absolute independence of America. 
Since the General Court would not rescind the 
Circular Letter, since it could not meet again until 
it did, and since it was important for the towns to 
confer, the Boston Town Meeting, at Adams' sug- 
gestion, got around the difficulty by calling a con- 
ference, in Boston, of town representatives. To 
this invitation ninety-six towns responded ; and while 
they did not accomplish much, they found out how 
easy it was to get together; and the time was rapid- 
ly approaching when they would need to act in 



Samuel Adams: New England Democrat 27 

unity. For on the very day (in October, 1768) 
that this convention adjourned, two regiments (the 
14th and 29th) arrived in Boston for the purpose 
of frightening the rebellious inhabitants into good 
behavior. 

The year 1769 was devoted by most of the peo- 
ple of Boston to abusing equally the importers of 
English goods and these imported English soldiers. 
Both were hooted at and called all manner of evil 
names continually, and the town government and 
the Governor were in a ceaseless quarrel over quar- 
ters for the troops. The town said that the soldiers 
should be kept down at the Castle (where Fort In- 
dependence now stands), but the Governor de- 
clared that for the protection of himself and the oth- 
er Crown officers they should be kept on duty in 
the very midst of the town ; so the streets and the 
Common resounded with drums and marching, and 
the main guard was posted on King (now State) 
Street, with guns pointed at the Assembly chamber. 
Considering the way they were abused by the 
tongues of the townspeople, the soldiers behaved 
pretty well ; and, of course, the longer they refrained 
from using force, the more abusive the populace be- 
came. Therefore it is a matter for wonder that not 
until they had been in Boston a year and a half did 
a real clash between the "lobster backs" and the 
citizens take place. That clash, needless to say, was 
the Boston Massacre, in which three citizens were 
killed and one mortally wounded. 

That affray took place in the evening. Early 
next morning the citizens, wild with indignation, 



28 New England Conscience 

assembled at Faneuil Hall in town meeting and ap- 
pointed a committee of fifteen, with Hancock as 
chairman, to interview the Governor and tell him 
that the regiments must be sent away. The meet- 
ing then adjourned till three o'clock in the after- 
noon, while the committee should wait upon Gov- 
ernor Hutchinson. He told them, as he had re- 
peatedly said before, that he had no power to order 
the removal of the troops. The committee was so 
determined, however, and the crowds in the streets 
were so threatening, that Hutchinson at last agreed 
to remove the 29th regiment, which had been con- 
cerned in the Massacre, to the Castle in the harbor. 
He absolutely refused, however, to order away the 
14th. 

Meanwhile the town-meeting had again assem- 
bled, and the people, pouring in from the surround- 
ing towns at the news of the Massacre, had so 
swelled the numbers that Faneuil Hall would not 
hold half the crowd. So the meeting was adjourned 
to the Old South Meeting House. Imagine the 
streets between that building and Faneuil Hall 
filled with a tremendously excited crowd and hear 
the cry: "Make way for the Committee of Fifteen," 
as that committee, with Hancock and Adams at 
their head, emerge from the Old State House, with 
the Governor's answer, and squeeze their way 
towards the waiting town-meeting. As the Com- 
mittee pass through the human lane which is made 
for them, Adams leans from one side to the other 
repeating, in a stage whisper, "Both regiments or 
none," "Both regiments or none." Arrived at the 



Samuel Adams: New England Democrat 29 

Old South, the report is made that the Governor 
will remove the 29th but will not remove the 14th 
regiment. Then the people, understanding what 
Adams meant, give a great shout: "Both regiments 
or none;" and the meeting votes tumultuously that a 
committee of seven should go back to the Govern- 
or with this ultimatum of the Town. Day had 
begun to wane and in the dim firelight of the Coun- 
cil Chamber sat the Governor and his advisers, to- 
gether with Colonel Dalrymple, the commander of 
the troops, waiting for the people's message, and 
in the high, gloomy church sat the people, waiting 
for the Governor's reply. 

It ,was a great moment in Samuel Adams' life 
when he strode into the Council Chamber ready to 
tell Governor Hutchinson that the will of the people 
inust over-ride the orders of the King. You know 
that picture of him in Faneuil Hall, — that picture 
painted by Copley, which represents Adams at this 
moment standing with his head thrown back, de- 
termination on every line of his face, his right 
hand crushing a roll of manuscript and his left hand 
outstretched, pointing to the Massachusetts Charter. 
And these are some of the words that he boldly said, 
knowing that every word meant rebellion, and re- 
bellion, hanging: 

"If you, or Colonel Dalrymple under you, have 
the power to remove one regiment, you have the 
itower to remove both ; and nothing short of their 
total removal will satisfy the people or preserve the 
peace of the Province. A multitude highly incensed 
now wait the result of this application. The voice 



30 New England Conscience 



of ten thousand freemen demands that both regi- 
ments be forthwith removed. Their voice must be re- 
spected, their demand obeyed. Fail not then at your 
peril to comply with this requisition. On you alone 
rests the responsibility of this decision; and if the 
just expectations of the people are disappointed, 
you must be answerable to God and your country 
for the fatal consequences that must ensue." 

A long discussion followed ; and finally Hutchin- 
son, urged by his counsellors and even by Dalrymple, 
gave in, and the message was brought back to the 
waiting people that democracy had won. Within 
a week both regiments were removed to the Castle; 
and always afterwards they were called the "Sam 
Adams Regiments." 

Adams and Democracy had for the moment tri- 
umphed, but the next two years were years of reac- 
tion. Times grew hard and harder, New York, 
which had agreed to the non-importation of British 
goods, went back on this agreement and so broke 
the force of the whole plan, the King's government 
grew more and more determined, the Whigs of Bos- 
ton more and more discouraged, and the Tories, 
consequently, more and more confident. In this 
crisis Adams saw that the only way to strengthen 
the cause of independence would be to bring the 
force of all the Massachusetts town-meetings to bear 
upon the somewhat wavering policies of the Boston 
Town Meeting. Therefore, in the fall of 1772, he 
moved, in the Boston meeting, that "A committee 
of Correspondence be appointed, to consist of twen- 
ty-one persons, to state the rights of the colonists. 



Samuel Adams: Neiv England Democrat 31 



and of this Province in particular, as men and 
Christians and as subjects; and to communicate and 
publish the same to the several towns and to the 
world," etc. Most of his friends thought this plan 
rather absurd and many of them refused to serve 
on the Committee; but the response w^hich came 
from the towns soon showed Adams to have been 
right. These Committees, we now know, were the 
very mainsprings of the Federal Union. It is in- 
spiring to read the bold words which came in to the 
Boston meeting, during the winter of 1772-1773 
from these towns. Said the people of Roxbury: 
"Our pious fathers died with the pleasing hope that 
we, their children, should live free. Let none, as 
they will answer it another day, disturb the ashes 
of those heroes by selling their birthright." Ipswich 
advised that the "inhabitants should stand firm as 
one man to support and maintain all their just rights 
and privileges." Salisbury, Beverly, Lynn. Dan- 
vers and Rowley declared for an American Union ; 
and in Plymouth the vote showed that there were 
ninety to one ready, if need be, to fight Great 
Britain. 

This action of Massachusetts spread to the other 
colonies, and in 1773 Virginia proposed that there 
be Committees of Correspondence between all the 
colonies. Later we shall see how Massachusetts 
responded to this suggestion ; but meanwhile oc- 
curred an event that brought the colonies still closer 
together in their opposition to increasing tyranny. 
As a result of the non-importation agreements, the 
new taxes had yielded practically no revenue to the 



32 New England Conscience 



Crown ; therefore they were now all taken off ex- 
cepting the tax on tea, which was left in order to 
show that the King reserved the right to tax. It 
is needless to go into the long controversy over 
this new taxation question, or to rehearse the self- 
sacrifice of the American women in giving up their 
favorite beverage, drinking catnip tea instead. It 
is well known how the shiploads of the proscribed 
herb were consigned to certain agents here, how those 
agents refused to resign, how the Boston Town 
Meeting tried to induce Hutchinson to send the tea 
back, and how he would not. After the arrival of 
the first tea-ship, the Dartmouth, on November 17, 
1773) town-meetings were held almost daily, — most 
of them in the Old South Meeting-house, — resolu- 
tions that the tea never should be landed were pass- 
ed, the ship was constantly guarded by armed 
citizens, and mounted couriers stood ready to alarm 
the country should the tea be brought on shore. 
At last came the day when, by law, the tea must be 
landed by the customs officers. The owners were 
ready to send the cargoes back; but the customs of- 
ficers would not give them permission, and two 
armed vessels were stationed in the channel with 
orders to sink the ships should they try to leave 
without their clearance papers. This was the i6th 
of December. Couriers had gone all over the prov- 
ince with the news; people from the whole eastern 
part of Massachusetts had poured in to see what 
was going to happen ; and a town-meeting duly call- 
ed was attended by seven thousand persons who 
filled the Old South Meeting-house and spread 



Samuel Adams: New England Democrat i'^ 



through the surrounding streets. This assemblage 
gave the owner of the tea-vessel one more chance ; 
so, in obedience to its orders, the much-abused man 
traveled way out to Hutchinson's country house 
on Milton Hill to beg once again for a permit to 
send his cargo back. Meanwhile the great crowd 
sat till long after dark, with Sam Adams as mod- 
erator, debating and discussing. Evidently some- 
thing was going to happen ; but only the few in 
the secret knew just what. After a long time poor 
old Mr. Rotch came back from Milton and report- 
ed that the Governor had again refused him a 
permit. Immediately Mr. Adams arose and in a 
loud and solemn voice said: "This meeting can 
do nothing more to save the country." That was 
the prearranged signal. Instantly a loud war- 
whoop w^as heard and forty or fifty men disguised 
as Indians rushed by the door, down Milk and 
Purchase Streets to Griffin's Wharf off which the 
tea ships were moored. The crowd rushed after 
them and such a tumult and howling quiet Boston 
had not heard for many a day. The imitation In- 
dians were quiet enough, however, when they got 
on board the ship, and in a short time they had hoist- 
ed every chest of tea, broken it open and dumped the 
contents into the sea. This last desperate measure 
had been planned under the direction of Adams 
in a printing office on Court Street which was long 
a favorite meeting-place of the patriot leaders. 

The King's answer to the Boston Tea Party was 
the Boston Port Bill. The English ministry thought 
this a very shrewd move; for, by closing the port of 



34 New England Conscience 

Boston to all entering and outgoing ships, the occu- 
pation of most of the people would be gone, and it 
was hoped that the.v would be starved into submis- 
sion. Furthermore, by diverting trade from Boston, 
other towns and colonies would benefit and would 
make so much profit that, it was thought, they would 
be quite willing to desert rebellious Boston. But in 
this they were completely mistaken. Although, to 
get back her trade, all the Boston Town Meeting 
had to do was to vote payment for the destroyed tea, 
they would not pass such a vote ; the towns which 
might have profited by Boston's misfortune refused 
to do so ; money, provisions, and votes of praise and 
encouragement came in from all over the colonies; 
and the demand for a congress of all the colonics 
grew louder and louder. 

In the interval, the Governor, practically power- 
less against the obstinacy of the Boston Town Meet- 
ing, had asked for leave of absence and had gone 
over to England, General Gage being appointed 
Governor in his place. As Boston was in disgrace, 
Gage forbade the General Court to meet there and 
ordered it to Salem, where it convened in June, 
1774. Its chief business was to appoint delegates to 
the proposed Continental Congress at Philadelphia; 
but this was kept a profound secret ; for, had it been 
known. Gage would have dissolved the Assembly be- 
fore it had a chance to carry out this plan. Sam 
Adams, however, was equal to the emergency. Keep- 
ing the General Court busy with matters of not 
much consequence, and having it debate resolutions 
which looked as if Massachusetts were getting ready 



Samuel Adams: Nezc England Democrat 35 



to yield to the King, he lulled suspicion to sleep and 
meanwhile \\ ent about among the members, secret- 
1}' pledging them to support him in what he pro- 
posed to do. At first he could be sure of only five 
members; but by the 17th of June (just a year be- 
fore the Battle of Bunker Hill) he was certain of 
a majority. So, as head of a committee on the state 
of the Province, he suddenly brought in a resolve 
that five men whom he named should be appointed 
delegates to a colonial congress to be held at Phila- 
delphia. The Tory members tried to choke off the 
measure and break up the session by leaving the 
hall ; but Adams had had the doors locked and had 
pocketed the key. One member, however, did es- 
cape and carried the news of what was going on 
to Gage, who immediately sent his personal agent 
to dissolve the Assembly. But the Assembly re- 
fused to let the Governor's messenger in until they 
had passed a vote appointing the delegates, ap- 
propriated money for their expenses and adopted 
various other measures against the government. 

We have no time to take up the extraordinary 
history of those Continental Congresses which 
finally produced the Declaration of Independence, 
and in which Samuel and John Adams and John 
Hancock played so conspicuous a part. But I would 
speak of still two more town meetings which took 
place in the Old South Meeting house. The first 
was in June, 1774. Boston's trade was dead, her 
ships and wharves were rotting, grass was growing 
in her streets, men who had been rich were living 
on the charity of other towns, obstinacy seemed to 



36 New England Conscience 



have resulted in nothing, and a simple confession 
that the Tea Party had been wrong would restore 
her trade and industry. The Tories, therefore, 
thought this the right time to call a town meeting 
at which to dissolve the Committee of Correspon- 
dence and to beg forgiveness of the mother country. 
Thousands came to the meeting — they had nothing 
else to do ; — gloom was on every face, fear of the 
future in every heart, continued resistance meant 
starvation and ruin; but Samuel Adams, leaving 
the chair as Moderator, led the debate for hours, 
and when the vote was finally taken, the townspeo- 
ple, by a great majority, declared themselves deter- 
mined to continue to resist. Moreover, they en- 
tered into a "solemn league and covenant" to use 
no British goods whatever until their wrongs should 
be righted. That was the crucial moment in Sam 
Adams' long fight for the independence of the col- 
onies; that vote of the Boston Town Meeting 
meant ultimate war. 

The second meeting was, like the first, illegal — 
for town meetings had been long ago forbidden — 
and was held on the 6th of March (the 5th 
being Sunday), 1775, the fifth anniversary of the 
Boston Massacre. The town was then wholly in 
the hands of soldiery — there being eleven regiments 
stationed there — a price was on the heads of Adams, 
Hancock, Otis, Warren and the other patriot lead- 
ers, any clash between the military and the people 
meant riot, massacre and the hanging of those pa- 
triot leaders: — yet on the Old South platform, 
behind a desk draped in mourning, calmly sat, as 



Samuel Adams: New England Democrat 37 



Moderator of the meeting, Samuel Adams; and 
packed into every available inch of the room sat 
and stood the people, waiting for Joseph Warren, 
the orator, to appear. Scattered through the audi- 
ence, to intimidate it, were many soldiers in uni- 
form and armed. Observing them, Adams asked 
the townspeople to vacate the front rows and in- 
vited the soldiers to occupy those pews so that 
they might the better hear what Dr. Warren was 
about to say. A full hour beyond the appointed 
time that tense audience awaited Warren ; and then 
he came in, not through the door, but through a 
window behind the pulpit, the crowd being so dense 
that he could find no other ingress. Warren was 
as eloquent as he was fearless, and every word he 
spoke was an invitation to the soldiers to cry treason 
and arrest him and the applauding audience. In- 
deed, one officer sitting on the pulpit stairs, held 
up his open palm filled with bullets where all the 
audience could see. Warren, without a moment's 
hesitation, dropped his handkerchief over the bul- 
lets and went steadily on. What a scene that was; 
and how that and like scenes of this great time have 
made that old South Meeting-House a sacred place 
forever ! 

I have spoken thus far mainly of Boston, for that 
was the headquarters of rebellion ; but, each in its 
own way, every other town in Massachusetts was 
equally active. Take my own town of Lexington, 
for example. It had but seven hundred inhabitants, 
almost all of them plain farmers, many of them 
scarcely able to read or to write their names; but 



38 New England Conscience 



thty knew history, they understood politics, they 
had been educated by a century of town meetings 
to know their rights and to speak their minds. 
There was not an act of the Boston Town Meeting 
or of the General Court which they had not eagerly 
followed ; there had been no crisis in the affairs of 
the colony which had not had its Lexington town- 
meeting to discuss the matter and to instruct the 
town's reoresentative. And that action was guided, 
those instructions were written by one of the great- 
est patriots and keenest minds of that time of great 
men, — Parson Jonas Clarke, who for fifty years was 
minister of Lexington and whose sermons were 
trumpet calls to stand fast in the cause of Liberty. 
Never was there a better school for patriots and 
a better teacher of the true principles of liberty than 
were those town meetings of Lexington, and that 
leader in those meetings, — Parson Clarke. 

It was no mere coincidence, therefore, that 
brought Hancock and Sam Adams into Lexington 
on the 1 8th of April, 1775, and found them at 
the house of Parson Clarke on the very night that 
Gage had fixed upon to strike the first blow against 
the patriot cause. Hancock and Adams both had 
a high price on their heads ; the very shadow of the 
gallows was over them; but they were serenely 
journeying to the second Continental Congress, 
sure that the people would protect them from all 
injury. And the inhabitants of Lexington were 
doing their part that night; for around Parson 
Clarke's house they had placed a guard of eight 
minute-men to keep careful watch. About mid- 



Samuel Adams: Neiv England Democrat 39 

night up came Paul Revere clattering and shout- 
ing ; there was hurried conference between Re- 
vere, Hancock and Adams; and while the latter 
wanted to shoulder muskets and take part in the 
coming fight, they were persuaded that their lives 
were too precious to be put in danger. Sergeant 
Munroe escorted them by back roads to a place 
of safety in Woburn, and got back to Lexington 
Green in time to line up the minute-men. A> 
Adams started out across the hills in the first gra\' 
of the dawn, he is said to have exclaimed : "What 
a glorious morning for America." It was indeed 
a glorious morning, and it meant the crowning of 
Samuel Adams' enormous labors during those eleven 
terrible years. From one point to another he had 
led the town meetings until from humble petition- 
ing they had gone on to proud defiance of the King 
and at last had arrived at the place where they were 
ready to take up arms and to surrender their lives 
in defence of liberty. 

Samuel Adams remained a conspicuous figure 
until his death in 1 803. He took a leading part 
in all the congresses of the Revolution and signed 
the Declaration of Independence. Moreover it was 
he who prepared the articles of confederation. But 
from the opening of the Revolutionary War his in- 
fluence and reputation seemed slowly to decline, so 
that not until comparatively recent years has his 
name begun to emerge from the sort of eclipse in 
which it rested behind those of such men as Wash- 
ington, John Adams and Jefferson. Why was this? 
Mainly, I think, because Samuel Adams had the 



40 New England Conscience 

abilities of a revolutionary rather than of a con- 
structive statesman. He quite strenuously opposed, 
for example, the acceptance of the Constitution by 
the Massachusetts Convention, and only reluctantly 
agreed to its adoption when he perceived that further 
opposition would be vain. He was a Republican, 
moreover, in a State which at that time was over- 
whelmingly Federalist; yet, curiously enough, while 
the other Republicans had followed the free-thinking 
of Jefferson and Paine, he continued a staunch sup- 
porter of the strictest Calvinism. His absorption in 
politics, furthermore, had made him wholly neglect- 
ful of such lesser matters as the support of his fam- 
ily, and had induced a carelessness in money affairs 
which had laid him open to charges, unquestionably 
unfounded, of having, as tax-collector, misappropri- 
ated funds. Finally his long years of fighting against 
British tyranny had made him, to use a good Yankee 
word, "cantankerous," and militated against his 
making those concessions to the views and opinions 
of others so essential in the building of a state. His 
election, therefore, in 1794, after he had served 
some years as Lieutenant Governor, to the governor- 
ship of Massachusetts, was in the nature of a re- 
ward somewhat perfunctorily given, in recognition 
of his earlier services, rather than a spontaneous 
choice of the people. An appreciation of this fact, 
as well as the increasing infirmities of his seventy- 
five years, led him, therefore, in 1797, to decline a 
renomination. He passed the remaining six or 
seven years of his life sitting in his modest house or 
his pleasant garden in Winter Street exchanging 



Samuel Adams: New England Democrat 41 

reminiscences with his contemporaries, fast thinning 
in number, or receiving the respectful homage of the 
younger generation. 

On the domestic side, the burden, ever since their 
early marriage, had been mainly carried by his ex- 
cellent and devoted wife (who, by her extraordinary 
thrift, made up in some measure for his lack of it,) 
and by his many friends who had to go so far, some- 
times, as to fit him out with such clothes and sums 
of money as he must have to make a decent ap- 
pearance as a public man. His only son, Samuel, 
was graduated at Harvard in 1771, studied medicine 
with Dr. Joseph Warren, served as a surgeon 
throughout the Revolution, but received, in that 
service, such damage to his constitution that he 
died in 1788. The money received from the gov- 
ernment as compensation for the services of this son 
was the sole support of Mr. Adams during his final 
years. It is interesting in this connection to re- 
member that the very large sums left in charity, a 
few years ago, by Dr. John and Miss Belinda Ran- 
dall, were derived almost wholly from the increment 
of that Adams property (they being grand-children 
of Samuel Adams through his daughter) on Winter. 
Washington and other down-town streets, which 
was of no contributory support to their illustrious 
grandfather. 

Another descendant, Mr. William V. Wells, 
published some years ago a biography of his an- 
cestor which fills three volumes, and which, it 
seems to me, tries to claim too much for Samuel 
Adams. He was a great figure, — seemingly an in- 



42 New England Conscience 

dispensable figure — during the decade preceding the 
Battle of Lexington ; but his greatest \\ ork for his 
country ended on that April morning when he stooil 
on the hills of Lexington and uttered (or might 
have uttered) that prophetic phrase. The Massa- 
chusetts Town Meeting had done its noble worlc ; 
and Samuel Adams, the man of the town meeting, 
the man who never faltered, never lost courage, 
never failed in resourcefulness, who would neither 
accept bribes nor heed threats, the "Great Incendi- 
ary," as Hutchinson called him, in whose hands 
(as Hutchinson also declared) all the other men 
were but puppets, — that man up to that day had been 
the gviiding spirit of it all. His cousin, John Adams, 
once enthusiastically called him "the wedge of steel 
which split the knot of lignu/n vitae that tied Amer- 
ica to England." That is a true description of the 
part he played ; and the force he used was the 
enormous democratic power of the New England 
Town Meeting. Those meetings were the main 
strength of the colonies, it was they which brought 
these colonies together in a splendid union, it wa^ 
they that held the States together through the ter- 
rible crisis of the Civil War, and we cannot ha\T 
real democracy in our huge modern cities until we 
find some way of getting at the people themselves 
as Sam Adams reached them face to face in the 
town meetings of the Old South Meeting House 
and Faneuil Hall. 



The Town of Lexington 43 

III 

The Town of Lexington* 

HISTORIANS, now careful dissectors 
of the body politic, were once mere 
brilliant painters of its outward show. 
Historical writers of the last century 
dealt only with wars and kings, with 
triumphs and catastrophes, heedless of the great body 
of the people through whom civilization really grows. 
Such a king reigned and died, such wars he waged, 
such alliances he made, — that was the substance 
of a chronicle as brilliant as it was superficial, 
liirths of everyday reformers, deaths of common- 
place martyrs, wars of classes and of trade, holy 
alliances of virtue and suffering, devil's alliances 
ef greed and hatred, — these, the real events of his- 
tory, had no place in this gazette of royalty. The 
progress of nations was, for those old-time chron- 
iclers, a kind of lordly game in which none but the 
honor cards had value. That this surface-life of 
the court and battle-field was founded upon a 
steadily advancing under-life of the people, that 
these kingly happenings were but the effects of pro- 
founder social and industrial causes, are facts of 
quite recent recognition. 

It is true that in its nearly three hundred years 



•Address at the Celebration of the 200th Anniversary 
of the Incorporation of Lexington, June 8, 1913. 



44 New England Conscience 



of history, what is now the United States of Amer- 
ica has had two great wars, — wars that in their re- 
sults were among the most momentous in all his- 
tory; but those conflicts were merely the outcrop- 
ping, so to speak, of vaster and deeper forces, to 
which war was but incidental. For the significant 
history of America has been one not of kings, but of 
families; not of courts, but of communities; not of 
bloody conquests of enemies, but of a splendid mas- 
tery of nature and of self. 

It was mainly for the sake of their wives and 
children that the Pilgrims adventured to the in- 
hospitable shores of Massachusetts ; it was the desire 
to establish a community life ordered as they be- 
lieved it should be that brought the Puritans to 
Salem and to Boston ; it was not single rovers, it 
was settlers with their families who pushed their 
brave way to Ohio, to the Mississippi, and across 
prairie and mountain to the far North-West. 

Social stability, industry, faith, love of freedom, — 
these were the corner-stones of every lasting struc- 
ture which our forefathers upreared. The greedy 
Spaniard, murderously seeking treasure, the thrifty 
Frenchman, exploiting the fur-trade, the roystering 
Gentlemen Adventurers, imagining the sand-heaps 
of Virginia to be fields of gold, either had no fam- 
ilies or had cut themselves adrift to court fortune 
in the unknown West. But on the "Mayflower," 
household goods and distaffs filled the spaces which, 
in the ships of earlier voyagers, had been given to 
weapons and munitions of war. The Plymouth 
Company came for peace, for quietude, for escape 



The Town of Lexington 45 

from a tyrannical government. With them their 
womenkind were first, for upon their wives and 
daughters the weight of persecution fell most 
heavily. And most of those who followed the Pil- 
grims, whether to New England, to Virginia, or 
to New Amsterdam, had in view that permanent 
settlement which means the bringing up of a fam- 
ily and the establishing of a stable, sober and in- 
dustrious community. These conditions of true 
colonization w^ere especially conspicuous, however, 
in Massachusetts Bay, the settlers wherein, mind- 
ful of the supreme importance of right training in 
youth, opened a Latin School five years after they 
landed, founded Harvard College only three years 
later, and enacted a general school-law (the first in 
the world) in 1647. 

Of the preeminently staid and enlightened com- 
munity of which Harvard College was the early- 
established centre, Lexington was, so to speak, the 
third child, the earlier offspring, set apart from the 
original Cambridge of 1644, having been Billerica 
far to the north, and Newton to the west and south. 

With the exception of that one "Glorious morn- 
ing," when seventy plain farmers stood and died 
like heroes, the outward history of Lexington has 
been quiet, uneventful, even humdrum. To at- 
tempt to make of it a dramatic narrative would be 
absurd. To cite it, however, as a superlative ex- 
ample of forces which made America great in the 
past and which should make her greater in the 
future, is perhaps worth while. 

Six generations have passed since March 31, 



46 New England Conscience 



1 7 13 (N.S.), when the "Inhabitants or farmers 
dwelling on a certain Tract of Out Lands within 
the Township of Cambridge in the County of Mid- 
dlesex liuing remote from the Body of the Town 
towards Concord. . . . being now increased 
. obtained Consent of the Town & made 
Application ... to be made a Separate & 
distinct Town, upon such Terms as they & the 
Town of Cambridge have agreed upon ;" and since 
the General Court of Massachusetts "ORDERED 
that the aforesaid Tract of Land known by the 
Name of the Northern Precinct in Cambridge be 
henceforth made a separate & distinct Town bv the 
Name of LEXINGTON ... & that the 
Inhabitants of the said Town of Lexington be en- 
titled to Have, Use, Exercise & Enjoy all such 
Immunities Powers & Privileges as other Towns of 
this Province have & do by Law Use Exercise and 
Enjoy." 

In each of these six generations the world has 
made always longer strides towards that perfect 
civilization to which mankind aspires. Therefore 
the two centuries of Lexington's corporate life have 
been the most fruitful in all human history. Since 
genuine democracy did not begin until 1688, prac- 
tically the whole development of mankind out of 
feudalism is measured by the comparatively short 
space since Lexington was born. 

In the first of those six generations v\as establish- 
ed the newspaper, perhaps the most far-reaching 
of the forces of enlightenment ; in the second the 
people of America issued successful from the first 



The Town of Lexington 47 

great conflict between privilege and justice; in the 
third, the face of Europe and the whole current of 
her affairs were changed by the French Revolution 
and Napoleon's astonishing career; the fourth gen- 
eration witnessed first the Reform Bill and then 
the epoch-making upheavals of 1848; in the fifth 
the people of the United States were forever welded 
by a civil conflict theretofore unheard of in its mag- 
nitude ; while in the sixth there has been such in- 
dustrial and social transformation as has filled the 
world of 19 1 3 with problems unknown and in- 
conceivable in 1 88 1. 

In these six wonderful periods of democratic ad- 
vance, this Town played a conspicuous part only 
in the second, but what she did in that second gen- 
eration not only profoundly affected the four gener- 
ations succeeding, but will influence world history 
to the very end of time. In the every-day life of 
Lexington, moreover, have been conspicuously ex- 
hibited those determining forces which created New 
England, the Middle West, and the great North- 
West, — the forces of family integrity, community 
responsibility, and sober striving towards ever high- 
er standards and ideals. 

In 1 713, when the Order of the General Court 
was passed, there were within the territory of Lex- 
ington less than five hundred persons. Partly be- 
cause the Town had been settled by the overflowing 
of surrounding communities, partly because the 
area now centering in the Common had been held 
for many years in the so-called Pelham grant, a 
larger proportion of those inhabitants lived on the 



48 New England Conscience 



outskirts than in the neighborhood of the single 
meeting-house. Therefore, during more than a 
half-century after its first settlement, the people of 
Cambridge Farms were compelled to travel from 
five to ten miles to the meeting-house at Cambridge, 
and for fully another fifty years after Cambridge 
had permitted the erection of a meeting-house at the 
Farms, most of the vi^orshipers were still obliged to 
journey from one to three miles every Sabbath to 
attend the services. Yet, because of the strict Puri- 
tanism of the day, which frowned upon or actually 
punished absence from the Sunday meeting, the 
townspeople, — thus forced to spend at least one 
day in seven in each other's company — had develop- 
ed a solidarity and community feeling otherwise 
difficult, if not impossible, to bring about. 

For, however scattered the population, every- 
thing in those Puritan days must focus in the vil- 
lage meeting-house. Attendance upon Divine ser- 
vice was made urgent both by public opinion and by 
fear of future punishment. Moreover, the town- 
meetings — held, down to 1846, within the sacred 
building — gave almost as much time to such parish 
questions as the choice of a minister, his compensa- 
tion, and his orthodoxy, as to the secular problems 
of roads and school-houses. Within the meeting- 
house every child whose parents hoped for its salva- 
tion must be baptized, every older citizen who cared 
for public opinion must have a regular sitting, every 
sinner might at any moment be summoned for public 
confession and judgment. AA^ile many could not, 
and many did not, become legal members of the 



The Town of Lexington 49 

church body, only those admitted to church fellow- 
ship enjoyed full measure of community rights ; and 
ambition for social standing could get its accepted 
seal only from the church organization, which, by 
its seating in the meeting-house, fixed for five or 
ten-year periods the exact degree of dignity of 
even*' family. 

Furthermore, many personal disputes in the coni- 
m-unity were settled by the minister, under whose 
charge also, direct or indirect, was the schooling 
of the children, and in whose study those who 
sought a higher education prepared, as a rule, for 
Harvard or Yale College. Those institutions them- 
selves existed at that time almost solely for the 
training of the ministry; and in many other ways 
there was continually emphasized to all the people 
of a New England community the supremacy not 
only in spiritual, but also in temporal matters, of 
the Puritan Church. 

That church, however, was not autocratic ; it 
was Congregational, ruled in temporal afifairs by 
the parish (and every early New England town 
was also a parish or several parishes), and in spirit- 
ual matters by those admitted to church fellowship. 
Each New England town was, therefore, a re- 
ligious democracy, which, inspired by Biblical ex- 
ample, put conspicuous emphasis upon family life, 
parental control and community responsibility. 
Every influence in a Massachusetts town during the 
eighteenth, and far into the nineteenth, century 
tended to magnify the responsibility of the male 
head of a family to rear his children j'n godliness 



50 New England Conscience 



and industry, to bring them early into communion 
with the orthodox faith, and to inspire them with 
a feeh'ng of personal obligation towards the place 
in which they lived. 

Second only to the meeting-house as an educator 
in family and community responsibility, was the 
town-meeting, which, because it dealt with church 
affairs, and in most instances was held in the meet- 
ing-house, partook not a little of the sacredness of 
the actual Sabbath service. The New England 
town-meeting was, and is, the most democratic 
parliament in the world. The moderator has, with- 
in certain rigid limits, autocratic powers; but so 
long as those bounds are not crossed, the humblest 
voter is equal, in freedom of debate and liberty of 
challenge, as well as in the actual count of votes, 
to the richest or most highly educated. As soon 
as a youth is twenty-one he may begin to practice 
every right, responsibility and duty of citizenship : 
and long before that day, the average village-bred 
boy is getting an admirable education in social re- 
sponsibility by listening to the often tedious, often 
irrelevant, but always thoroughly democratic, town- 
meeting debates. 

The very legislative Order which created Lex- 
ington commanded the constable to call a town- 
meeting; and within six days the "Inhabitants duly 
qualified for Votes" had not only elected numerous 
town officers, but their selectmen had agreed that 
they would "build a Pound, . . . erect a 
Payer of Stocks, and Provide the Town with 
Waights and measurs." Two weeks later, the citi- 



The Town of Lexington 51 



zens, duly assembled, granted "416 Pounds mony 
to the Comitte for Building of the meeting-house." 

That second meeting-house (the first having 
been built in 1692) stood, as did its successor 
(erected in 1794 and burned in 1846) on the 
easterly end of the Common. The Common itself 
had been purchased only two years before the 
Town's incorporation from "Nibour" Muzzy; 30 
that almost contemporaneously with the erection of 
Lexington were established the forum for inciting 
and the theatre for enacting the first battle of the 
Revolutionary War. 

In June of the year following incorporation, 
the Selectmen "agred that John Muzzy should 
have thare aprobation to Kep a publique House of 
Entertainement : and his father did Ingage before 
the selectmen to a Comadate his son John with 
stabble roome hzyt and Pastuering: so fare as he 
stood In nead : for the Suport of Strangers." 

Eleven years earlier, John Muzzy's father, Ben- 
jamin, had established the first tavern in Cambridge 
Farms, on the edge of what he later sold for a Com- 
mon and close to the meeting-house. If that old 
Muzzy, or Buckman, Tavern, which the citizens 
have so generously and wisely acquired, could speak, 
what a story it could tell: of the strangers coming 
from New Hampshire and Vermont for entertain- 
ment — as it was called — on their last night before 
reaching Boston; of the detailed town gossip ex- 
changed there over flip and cider betwixt Sabbath 
services; of the sermons carried across in drowsy 
summer days from the open windows of the meet- 



52 New England Conscience 



ing-house, sermons that, as Colonial affairs became 
more critical, grew more and more to resemble the 
calls to battle of the old Hebrew prophets; of the 
long debates in town-meeting over the schools, the 
roads, the acts of the Great and General Court and 
the unwarranted usurpations of his Majesty's gov- 
ernment; and, finally, of that cool night in April 
when the alarm of Revere having called the Min- 
ute-Men together at two in the morning, the 
"greater part of them" being dismissed temporarily, 
"went to Buckman's Tavern," and then, at half- 
past four, precipitately rushed out again to fall in 
line, — seventy farmers opposing eight hundred 
British troops. The old house itself actually took 
part in the affray, for from its back door, and again 
from its front door, at least one man aimed at the 
British, and drew upon the building a return fire, 
the marks of which remain to-day. 

The courageous decision not only to face an over- 
whelming foe, but also to take the imminent risk 
of being hanged, was no sudden impulse on the part 
of those plain citizens of Lexington. They were 
not hot-headed youth, bred to idleness and eager for 
a quarrel; they were not mercenaries with whom 
fighting is a trade; they were not swashbucklers 
glad to seize any excuse for rioting and bloodshed. 
They were sober, thinking citizens, for the most 
part heads of families. Their wives and children 
were within sound of their muskets; their homes, 
their lands, their church, — all that they held dear — 
were witnesses to their boldness in defying the 
pov»fer of Great Britain, a power that could, if the 



The Town of Lexington 53 

issue of the conflict went against them, wipe out 
their township, beggar their families and gibbet 
them as rebels to their King. 

It is true that most of them were accustomed to 
the bearing of arms. Those were still pioneer days 
when the use of the musket was a necessary part of 
education ; and many of the Minute-Men had been 
honorable actors in the long war against the French 
and Indians. But they were not soldiers in the 
usual meaning; they were citizen-defenders, driven 
to the desperate stand they took by a long series of 
tyrannies, the continuance of which, they foresaw, 
would be worse than even forfeiture and hanging. 
Every man of them realized what he was doing, 
knew why he did it, and stood ready to accept the 
consequences. This fact, and also the fact that, in 
the proportion of those killed and wounded to the 
total force engaged, this was one of the bloodiest 
of battles, make the fight on Lexington Green a 
great event in human history. 

So far as concerns Massachusetts as a whole, the 
resistance at Lexington may be said to date from 
1646, when the Colony made its first formal protest 
against the pretensions of the English Parliament; 
but so far as concerns Lexington itself, the Battle 
may be declared to have begun with the ordination, 
in 1698, of the Reverend John Hancock, grand- 
father of him whose bold signature stands first upon 
the Declaration. The Reverend John Hancock 
ministered to the people of Lexington for fifty- 
five years, a real shepherd to his sheep, one who 
made them feel in the highest degree their responsi- 



54 New England Conscience 



bilities to their families and to the community in 
which they lived. Dying in 1752, "Bishop" Han- 
cock, as he was sometimes called, was succeeded by 
his grandson-in-law, the Reverend Jonas Clarke, 
an unfailing fount of inspiration to those who de- 
fended human rights at Lexington. From his or- 
dination in 1755, Parson Clarke, both in the pulpit 
and on the floor of the town-meeting, kept before 
his people the supreme sacredness of liberty, the 
right of resistance to oppression, and the solemn 
duty of transmitting to posterity the privileges of 
freemen that the fathers had won. 

The instructions given to the successive represen- 
tatives to the General Court, and to other assem- 
blages, by Lexington town-meetings, beginning as 
early as 1765, and extending practically through the 
Revolutionary War, were all written by Jonas 
Clarke, and are models of trenchant English and of 
cogent reasoning. In remonstrating against the 
Stamp Act, Parson Clarke said, through the 
medium of the town-meeting: — 

"... when we Consider the invaluable 
Rights and Liberties we now possess, the Firmness 
and Resolution of our Fathers, for the Support and 
Preservation of them for us, and how Much we 
owe to our Selves and to Posterity, we Cannot but 
look upon it as an unpardonable Neglect, any 
longer to delay expressing how deeply we are Con- 
cerned at Some Measures adopted by the late Min- 
istry." (and) . . . "We earnestly recommend 
to You (our representatives) the most calm, decent 
and dispassionate Measures, for an open, Explicit 



The Town of Lexington 55 

and resolute assertion and vindication of our Char- 
ter Rights and Liberties; and that the Same be so 
entered upon Record, that the World may see, and 
future Generations Know, that the present both 
knew and valued the Rights they enjoyed, and did 
not tamely resign them for Chains and Slavery." 

Subsequent instructions, remonstrances and re- 
solves all breathe the same spirit of lofty patriotism ; 
and in due time it was resolved, unanimously, 
"That if any Head of a Family in this Town, or 
any Person shall from this time forward ; and un- 
till the Duty be taken ofi; purchase any Tea, or 
Use, or consume any Tea in their Famelies, such 
person shall be looked upon as an Enemy to this 
Town, and to this Country, and shall by this Town 
be treated with Neglect and Contempt." 

The work of Parson Clarke was not limited, 
however, to these occasional documents. Almost 
every Sunday, in the ten years preceding the open- 
ing of the Revolution, he is said to have urged from 
the pulpit, in such indirect manner as was consistent 
with due reverence, the fundamental truths for 
which he believed the New England Church, as 
well as the New England Town-Meeting, should 
unalterably stand. Consequently, the very walls 
of the meeting-house became saturated with the 
spirit of resistance to oppression ; and the humble 
farmer folk who listened Sunday after Sunday to 
their parson's preaching must have come to regard 
it as beyond question that they should go to any 
lengths necessary to preserve for their children the 
heritage of freedom which they and their ancestors 



56 New England Conscience 

had, by their labor and self-sacrifice, so hardly won. 
Indeed, as early as December, 1773, in their re- 
monstrance against the taxation of tea, the inhab- 
itants of Lexington declared: "We are ready and 
resolved to concur with" . . . ("our brethren 
in Boston, and other Towns") "in every rational 
Measure, that may be Necessary for the Preserva- 
tion or Recovery of our Rights and Liberties as 
Englishmen and Christians; and we trust in GOD 
That should the State of Our Ajffairs require it, 
fVe shall be ready to Sacrifice our Estates, and every 
thing dear in Life, Yea and Life itself, in support 
of the common Cause." 

Thus was plainly foreshadowed the beginning of 
revolt, the only question being that of time and 
place. Consequently, when it was ordained that 
the time for armed resistance should be in the spring 
of 1775, and that the place should be along the 
march of the British troops from Boston to destroy 
the military stores at Concord, the little band of 
Lexington Minute-Men took it as a matter of 
course that they should interpose their seventy 
bodies across the pathway of eight hundred troops. 
They could have had no thought or hope of stop- 
ping that expedition; they had no fanatic dream 
of martyrdom ; — they simply were carrying out at 
the foreordained moment the instructions which 
they had received, Sunday after Sunday, and in 
town-meeting after town-meeting, from the voice 
and pen of their great spiritual leader. 

Not even the soul of Jonas Clarke could lead, 
however, unless there were other great souls ready 



The Town of Lexington 57 



to be led. The Minute-Men of Lexington were 
not of so-called noble or even gentle blood, the 
rules of chivalry were unknown to them, they were 
unread in the tales of heroes, whether classic or 
mediaeval. But they and their forebears for nearly 
two centuries had loved freedom in the abstract, 
and had known it in the concrete. They had ruled 
themselves in church and in town-meeting; and 
they knew that the acts of England, unless resisted, 
must put an end to that self-government. To stop 
the British troops was impossible; but to show to 
the British government that they, the fathers of the 
hamlet of Lexington, were indeed "ready," as they 
had many months before declared "to Sacrifice, 
Yea, Life itself in support of the common Cause," 
was possible. Two volleys were enough to disperse 
them; but in thus nonchalantly ending seven lives, 
Smith and Pitcairn signed the death-warrant of the 
British army in America, severed from England a 
territory of enormous area and incalculable value, 
broke forever the power of the English throne, and, 
indirectly, sowed the dragon's teeth from which 
were to spring the devastating legions of Napoleon. 
Well may we of Lexington, of Massachusetts, 
and of all America, preserve this acre of greens- 
ward, bought from "Nibour" Muzzy for £ib, but 
made priceless by the blood of those seven Minute- 
Men. Jonas Parker, father of ten children, the 
youngest still in her teens, vowed he would never 
run, and fell on the spot where he first stood, bay- 
oneted in the very act of reloading. Robert Mun- 
roe, a standard bearer at Louisburg, a man advanc- 



58 New England Conscience 



ed in years, died as Ensign, holding again, at least 
metaphorically, the flag at Lexington. Samuel 
Hadley, with three small children at home, and 
John Brown, a youth of twenty-four, were slain after 
they had obeyed Pitcairn's order and had left the 
field. John Muzzy, in the prime of life, "was 
found dead," as John Munroe testified, "near the 
place where our line was formed;" Caleb Harring- 
ton, another youth of twenty-four, was shot while 
leaving the meeting-house where, before the fight, 
he and others had gone to remove, if possible, a 
quantity of powder; and Jonathan Harrington, 
fighting literally before his own fireside, his wife 
and child watching him from the window, crawled, 
mortally bleeding, to his doorstep and died at his 
wife's feet. 

These men, — some veterans, some scarcely more 
than lads, some with the responsibilities of house- 
holds, others with the burdens and rewards of life 
still ahead of them — fought and died, not for 
money or glory or the love of battle. They fought 
in defence of the Town- Meeting, that instrument 
which, in the hands of freemen, is the basis of all 
efficient government; they fought in defence of the 
family, that indispensable foundation of real civil- 
ization; they fought in defence of the Church, 
which, whether Catholic or Protestant, whether 
Episcopal or Congregational, whether your faith 
or my faith or the faith of those who worship in 
divers and, to us, strange ways, is the eternal flame 
that gives to government, to family, and to civiliza- 
tion itself, their essential and enduring worth. 



Josiah Quincy, New England Aristocrat 59 



IV 
Josiah Quincy, the New England Aristocrat 

I GIVE to my son, when he shall arrive to 
the age of fifteen years, Algernon Sydney's 
works, John Locke's works, Lord Bacon's 
works, Gordon's Tacitus, and Cato's Let- 
ters. May the spirit of Liberty rest upon 
him!" Such was the significant legacy of one of 
the purest patriots of the Revolution, Josiah Quincy, 
Jr., to one of the sincerest builders of the Republic, 
his son, Josiah Quincy, 3rd. And throughout that 
son's long life, while a member of Congress and of 
both Houses of the Legislature, while President 
of Harvard University, while Mayor of Boston, 
a lofty independence did indeed rest upon this ver- 
satile man. What a period was spanned by the 
career of that second mayor of historic Boston ! 
His earliest memories were of Gage's soldiers peering 
into the carriage windows as his mother and he 
hastened from beleaguered Boston ; the tidings 
v^hich reached his sinking senses were of the closing 
of the Union armies upon beleaguered Richmond. 
Josiah Quincy might have heard the shots at Lex- 
ington which began, might have heard the fusillades 
at Petersburg which completed, the splendid strug- 
gle for American liberty. He knew Washington ; 
he knew Lincoln ; and there was scarcely an Ameri- 
can statesman of the more than two intervening 
generations whom he had not at least met. Predict- 



6o New England Conscience 



ing, almost from the adoption of the Constitution, 
the rise and arrogance of the slave power, he lived 
to see that power crushed, — and in no small degree 
by the very states created to maintain it. Vowing 
himself from early manhood to a public career, he 
was permitted to fulfill that vow, not in just such 
wise as he intended, but still with a wide range and 
broad activities. His life Wing almost contem- 
poraneous with the infancy and adolescence of the 
United States, he was conspicuously a mentor of 
that lusty child and youth; and when, the best- 
known citizen of Boston, he sank to his final sleep, 
he had seen that Republic, whose birth-time was 
his own, just entering, with the close of the Civil 
War, upon its true, and we pray its infinite, man- 
hood among the great nations of the world. 

Singular, then, in its extraordinary length of 
years and its varied usefulness, Josiah Quincy's 
career was remarkable, too, in that, though an 
American publicist, he was not a self-made man. 
On the contrary, in the sense in which we may use 
the word, he was an aristocrat; by the modest stand- 
ards of the last century, he was rich. Moreover, 
he was liberally educated, he was strikingly hand- 
some, he was graceful and eloquent, and behind 
him was the influence, through family alliance, of 
New England's whole power and prestige. In 
short, every gift which nature and fortune could 
provide was his. And mainly for that reason his 
career is of such importance at this time. It is 
natural, of course, in a democratic country, it is 
Still more natural in a country pushed, by successive 




JOSIAH QUINCY 



Josiah Quincy, New England Aristocrat 6i 

generations of frontiersmen, across three thousand 
miles of territory, that our great men should so 
largely have been poor boys, that our leaders in city 
and state should painfully have climbed from the 
bottom of the social ladder. And it is still more to 
be expected that our hero tales and our biographies 
should magnify those self-made men, should em- 
phasize in the life of every prominent American 
the mean and sordid obstacles which he had to 
overcome. But the urgent need of this country 
is not for more self-made men ; it is that the men 
made by our vast and expensive systems of educa- 
tion, men who are heirs to the luxury, the refine- 
ment, the nice sense of aesthetic and ethical values 
created by generations of toil, of aspiration, of seek- 
ing for the high and good things of life, should take 
part in the work of democracy; that they should 
not, as the phrase is, descend into politics, but that 
they should lift politics up to them. The gravest 
menace to our social order is in the fact that youth 
of inherited brains, culture and opportunity, young 
men who need never seek money, young men who 
have everything to bring to the commonwealth, 
should not devote their talents and their time to 
the public service; but instead, should either dissi- 
pate both in social inanities, or should consume them 
in heaping up more riches for the mere vulgar pleas- 
ure of accumulation. So crying is the country's 
need for the service of well-born, well-educated, 
well-dowered youth, that history and biography 
might well turn away completely for a time from 
the self-made leader and demand that the country 



62 New England Conscience 

be officered by men of a more perfect manufacture. 

Of the most exquisite patrician workmanship was 
Josiah Quincy, the third of that name. Let us, 
therefore, since we are to deal with an aristocrat, 
enter the long gallery of his household and examine 
some of the ancestral portraits. Those from Eng- 
land include many a county magnate, many a 
member of that solid gentry which is really more 
noble than the House of Peers. Of the American 
portraits, the first is that of Edmund Quincy, who 
came to Boston in 1639 in the godly society of the 
Rev. John Cotton. No artisan or servitor was that 
Edmund Quincy. He was a man of property, bring- 
ing with him six servants, and purchasing from 
Chickatawbut, the Sachem of the Mos-Wachusetts, 
large tracts of land in Braintree, some of which, 
though now in the city of Quincy, are still family 
possessions. 

See now the next portrait, that of the second 
Edmund Quincy, son to the first. He was a true 
English squire, living on his Braintree estates and 
representing that part of the colony in the General 
Court. The next portrait is of his sister Judith, 
wife to John Hull, the colonial mintmaster; and 
beside her is the picture of her lovely daughter, who 
married Judge Samuel Sewall and is said to have 
received as her dowry her own plump weight in 
her father's pinetree shillings. Not far from the 
portrait of the second Edmund Quincy are those of 
his sons Daniel and Edmund, 3d. Behind Daniel 
opens another gallery with faces best known of all 
those that Massachusetts holds in honor, for this 



Josiah Quincy, New England Aristocrat 63 



Daniel Quincy was the ancestor of John Adams, 
and the later Adamses. While Daniel was the 
more honorable in his descendants, Edmund was 
the more distinguished in his own person, for he was 
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Massachu- 
setts and was sent by the General Court on a 
special mission to England. 

On either side of this Chief Justice Edmund 
Quincy we see the portraits of his two sons, Ed- 
mund the fourth, who is distinguished chiefly as the 
father of Dorothy Q., afterwards Mrs. John Han- 
cock; and Josiah, the first of that name, who mar- 
ried a Jackson and, through the fortunate capture 
by one of his merchant vessels of a Spanish treasure 
ship, greatly increased the family fortunes. As a 
consequence, at the age of forty, this first Josiah 
Quincy retired from mercantile affairs and lived as 
a country gentleman on his estates at Braintree. 
He was an intimate friend of Benjamin Franklin, 
and it is in a letter from Franklin to this friend 
Quincy that occurs the famous and eternally true 
phrase: "There never was a good war or a bad 
peace." 

This Colonel Quincy (so styled to distinguish 
him from the other Josiahs) had three sons: Ed- 
mund, Samuel, and the famous patriot, Josiah 
Quincy, Jr. Edmund was a leading merchant of 
the Boston of Revolutionary times, and died on a 
voyage to the West Indies. Samuel was Solicitor- 
General for the colonies ; but, electing the cause of 
the crown, he sailed away with Gage's troops from 
Boston and never returned to America. 



64 New England Conscience 

The third son, Josiah Quincy, Jr., was, physical- 
ly and mentally, a flame of fire, the body rapidly 
wasting with disease, the mind burning with un- 
quenchable zeal. He lived with that mental in- 
tensity and physical self-forgetfulness characteristic 
of so many consumptives. Knowing that death must 
come to him early, he would crowd the whole of 
life into a few short years. So he threw himself 
into the cause of the outraged colonies with bold- 
ness, almost with abandon. Truly it took courage 
to write in the public prints of 1767, even though 
veiled under the name of "Hyperion," such words 
as these: "Blandishments will not fascinate us, nor 
will threats of a 'halter' intimidate. For under God 
we are determined that, wheresoever, whensoever, or 
howsoever we shall be called to make our exit, we will 
die freemen." And when, on the night of the Boston 
Tea Party, the old South meeting-house was burst- 
ing with an excited multitude, waiting for an 
answer from Hutchinson, Josiah Quincy, Jr., stood 
in the gallery and poured hot, rash speeches out upon 
the fevered assembly. Harrison Gray, standing 
below, warned "the young gentleman in the gal- 
lery" of the dreadful results of such treasonable 
utterances. To which Quincy retorted: "If the 
old gentleman on the floor intends, by his warning 
to 'the young gentleman in the gallery,' to utter 
only a friendly voice in the spirit of paternal ad- 
vice, I thank him. If his object be to terrify and 
intimidate, I despise him." 

Quincy 's greatest act, of course, was his defence, 
in association with John Adams, of the perpetrators 



Josiah Quincyj New England Aristocrat 65 

of the so-called Boston Massacre. His friends 
remonstrated bitterly against a course that threaten- 
ed to undo his career and to nullify his previous 
efforts against British tyranny. Notable is his written 
reply to his father: . . . "These criminals, charged 
with murder, are not yet legally proved guilty, and 
therefore, however criminal, are entitled, by the laws 
of God and man, to all legal counsel and aid." 
. . . "I dare affirm that you and this whole people 
will one day REJOICE that I became an advocate 
for the aforesaid 'criminals,' charged with the mur- 
der of our fellow-citizens." 

In August, 1774, Josiah Quincy, Jr., was chosen 
to go to Europe on a secret mission to the friends 
of America. As far as his letters and journals 
record it, this mission was most successful. He 
found the supporters of the American cause far more 
numerous than he had anticipated, and, with them, 
he made plans of so important a nature that they 
could not be intrusted to letters, of so urgent a 
character that there was nothing except for him 
to bring them, locked in his own bosom, back to 
America. The tempestuous seas of March and an 
access of his disease made such a course suicidal; 
and, in fact, the greatly prolonged voyage and the 
discomfort of the ship proved too much for his feeble 
body. On April 26, 1775, three days before the 
vessel made its port of Gloucester, Josiah Quincy, 
Jr., breathed his last. He had fought against death 
with all his unflagging courage, praying every hour 
that he might live long enough to have but one 
interview with Samuel Adams or Joseph Warren. 



66 New England Conscience 



In 1769, this martyr to the cause of liberty had 
married Abigail Phillips, daughter to William Phil- 
lips, and to them, on the fourth of February, 1772, 
had been born a son, Josiah Quincy, 3rd. Left 
thus tragically a widow with this infant son, Mrs. 
Quincy dedicated him to the public service and 
brought him up with Spartan discipline. John 
Locke was then in vogue, and Mrs. Quincy ap- 
plied both the practical and the fantastical precepts 
ol that bachelor philosopher with the impartial 
b'teralness of conscientious motherhood. Regard- 
less of the weather, the little Josiah was carried 
from his warm bed and plunged thrice into water 
right from the well ; his feet, as Locke absurdly 
prescribes, were kept as wet as the weather would 
permit; and in other ways more sensible he was 
hardened to the strenuous life of those rude days. 
As the times were not advantageous to the settling 
of the child's considerable estate, the young Quincy 
lived with his grandfather Phillips and in temporary 
dependence upon him. But the old gentleman was 
not only a Puritan, he was an irascible one; little 
Josiah was noisy and high of spirit. Therefore, at 
the age of six, his mother had no alternative but to 
send the youngster off to Andover, to the Academy 
founded by his grandfather, to be schooled by that 
stern Calvinist, the Rev. Eliphalet Pearson. There 
for the first four years this little martyr sat on a 
hard bench four hours in the morning, four hours 
in the afternoon, conning Cheever's Accidence, of 
which, of course, not one sentence was intelligible. 
His seat-mate was Capt. Cutts, a man of thirty, who 



Josiah Quincy, New England Aristocrat 67 



was trying thus late to repair his faulty education ; 
and the only relief, in school, from the sombre com- 
pany of Cheever, the Rev. Eliphalet and the mature 
Captain, was in the learning of Watts' Hymns, — 
to us a somewhat fearful form of recreation. 

By his tenth year, however, young Josiah, after 
floundering through Cheever's Accidence twenty 
times, reached the firmer ground of Caesar and 
Nepos. At fourteen he went to Harvard, and 
found no difficulty in finishing his course there with 
such credit as to be honored at Commencement with 
the English Oration. After graduation, his moth- 
er, from whom he had been separated twelve years, 
took a house in Court Street, and Josiah began the 
study of the law with Col. William Tudor, a man 
of large practice. He was determined, however, 
that politics should be his career, and deliberately 
prepared himself for them, as politics should be pre- 
pared for, in the manner of one entering a pro- 
fession. 

I need not dwell upon the provincialism of the 
Boston of those stagecoach days. As compared with 
our own, the life of that time seems narrow and 
rather stupefying. But it was simple, it was whole- 
some, it furnished a good soil in which to ripen 
strong, earnest men of affairs, men who in politics 
and in business would build soundly and solidly. 
It was an atmosphere that conspired, however, 
against Josiah Quincy. He was so fortunately born 
that he had no need to earn a name for himself; 
his money prospects were so good that the law was 
hardly more than an avocation ; his position was so 



68 New England Conscience 

secure that no friend thought it necessary to push 
him forward ; there existed then, as now, a 
popular prejudice against rich men seeking office; 
a certain austerity made his entrance into politics 
a difficult one. It was therefore much to the credit 
of Quincy that he should have overcome these dis- 
advantages, as real as would have been those of 
poverty and obscurity. But first, he was to see the 
world and to get married. The journey, carefully 
planned, ended almost as soon as begun ; the mar- 
riage, as is the way of matrimony, was not planned, 
but lasted most happily for fifty-three years. It 
followed a real instance of love at first sight; and 
the young lady, Eliza Susan Morton, of New York, 
in a lifetime of devotion and congenial companion- 
ship, proved the wisdom of his sudden choice. 
Nothing was said to his mother, however, of his 
amorous state, and he started for New York (where, 
by the way, letters of introduction to her relatives 
permitted him to see much of Miss Morton), and 
journeyed thence to Philadelphia, where he visited 
his cousin John Adams (then Secretary of State), 
and saw more or less of President Washington, 
by whom he was not particularly impressed. From 
Philadelphia, he planned to travel on horseback to 
Charleston, South Carolina, and to sail from that 
port for the grand tour of Europe; but he was 
summoned back by a mercantile failure involving a 
portion of his fortune. He never thereafter went, 
or seemed to care to go, abroad. In due time he 
announced his engagement, married Miss Morton, 
and they came to live with his mother, who had 



Josiah Quincy, New England Aristocrat 69 



removed to a beautiful house on Pearl Street. With 
his marriage, Josiah Quincy's long public career 
began. 

I have gone into this extended account of the 
Quincy family history, not that I might, — as is too 
often the case with biographers, — magnify the de- 
scendant through the aureole of his forebears, but 
because, in presenting any historical portrait, one 
must take heed to the background; and with this 
second Mayor of Boston, his background of family 
tradition was fundamental to his career. When one 
looks at Greenough's statue of him, one must see 
that rather formal figure, not set against the City 
Hall of to-day; but backed instead by the glow 
of the Revolution, by the atmosphere of aris- 
tocratic habit which the Quincys brought from 
England, by the golden mist of family tradi- 
tion surrounding the early vision of every son 
of the house. At heart Josiah Quincy was not a 
democrat, he was a patrician. As his father had 
solemnly prayed, the mantle of liberty had fallen 
upon him ; but it was the liberty of England before 
the Reform Bill, the liberty of gentlemen ; it was 
not at all the freedom for which America was then 
groping, and which it has yet by no means at- 
tained. From his first entrance into politics Quincy 
was a Federalist; and he remained a Federalist to 
his dying day, when a whole generation had forgot- 
ten what manner of belief this Federalism was. 
For, like Boston, Federalism was not so much a 
party as a state of mind ; like most states of mind it 
was curiously contradictory; and in Massachusetts 



70 New England Conscience 



it was more strangely contradictory than anywhere 
else. Of that Massachusetts Federalism — at least 
after the defection of John Quincy Adams — Josiah 
Quincy was high-priest. 

It is a difficult thing to define; but, as I under- 
stand it, this, roughly speaking, was the Federalism 
of Josiah Quincy's time : — It believed in a centraliz- 
ed government; yet placed New England above the 
nation, and Massachusetts above the rest of New 
England. Having Washington as its leader. Fed- 
eralism regarded the Revolution as peculiarly its 
own ; yet, as Lowell truly says, the Federalists were 
the only Tory party we have ever had. Assuming 
the attitude of defenders of the Constitution, they 
nevertheless found themselves forced, by Jefferson's 
policy, into a position bordering closely upon nulli- 
fication. Violently in disagreement with the South, 
it was yet the Federalists who declared, through 
Quincy, that secession is sometimes right. Believ- 
ing in commercial expansion, they yet opposed the 
territorial expansion involved in the purchase of 
Loin'siana. Haters of England because of her past 
tyrannies on land and of her present tyrannies on 
the sea, they were driven, through their distrust 
of France, into a sort of advocacy of Great Britain. 
As the party of foreign commerce, they loved peace ; 
yet they found themselves urging an unwilling 
Congress to build up a navy to be used for war. 
Every step leading to the War of 1812, that war 
itself, they opposed ; and the lame and impotent con- 
clusion of the struggle proved them to have been 
right; yet that mad enterprise firmly established the 



Josiah Quincy, New England Aristocrat 71 



party of Jefferson and absolutely killed theirs. In 
1789, Federalism, with Washington and Hamilton 
as its leaders, was a supreme power; by 181 5, it had 
become a disembodied ghost, killed, primarily, by 
the French Revolution. For the party battles of 
those twenty-five years were fought, not on Ameri- 
can, but on foreign soil ; the real contest between 
the party of Hamilton and the party of Jefferson 
was between the limited, but true, democratic ideals 
of England, and the illimitable but wholly illusory 
liberie, egalite, fraternite of France. Given time 
and strong leaders. Federalism might perhaps have 
won ; but in its desperation it made the fatal mis- 
take of allying itself with Burr; it committed the 
further folly of calling, in time of war, the Hart- 
ford Convention; — and its doom was sealed. Most 
of the principles of Federalism lived as long as Mr. 
Quincy, and are living to-day; but the party of 
Federalism died absolutely fiftv years earlier than 
he. 

As representing, then, the Federalists, a hopeless 
minority in the national Congress; as a Bostonian 
of the Bostonians — even at that day regarded by 
the rest of the country with a curious mingling of 
deference and contempt ; — as the advocate of prin- 
ciples rather English than American, Josiah Quincy, 
in the very nature of things, could not reach that 
prominence in the councils of the nation which his 
mental and oratorical powers merited and which, 
there is every reason to believe, he coveted. 

Elected to the national House of Representatives 
in 1804, he immediately began a special preparation 



72 New England Conscience 



for his duties by reading and digesting all the 
political documents at his command, and by taking 
up (and this seems to hint of diplomatic ambitions) 
the study of French. In Congress, Mr. Quincy 
early made himself a leader of the minority and 
delivered a number of notable and truly eloquent 
speeches against the policies of Jefferson. As an 
official protector of the maritime interests of New 
England, he urged the proper defense of the coasts, 
a policy to which the Republicans were deeply op- 
posed ; as the champion of those same cruelly abused 
interests, he denounced the chimerical schemes of 
Jefferson for bringing old England to terms through 
the ruin of New England's commerce. Always 
fearful of the growing power and pretension of the 
South, Mr. Quincy opposed every measure threaten- 
ing to extend slavery or giving representative power 
based on servile population. Above all, he opposed 
that supreme measure for increasing, as he believed, 
the power of the slave states, the purchase of Louisi- 
ana. Historic is his great speech against the Louisi- 
ana Purchase, for in it he enunciated thus early 
that doctrine of States' rights, which was to vex 
the country for years, and to lead finally to Civil 
War. In arguing that the administration had no 
right to purchase Louisiana without first obtaining 
the consent of each one of the thirteen original 
states, Mr. Quincy said: "It is my deliberate opin- 
ion, that, if this bill passes, the bonds of this Union 
are virtually dissolved ; that the States which com- 
pose it are free from their moral obligations, and 
that, as it will be the right of all, so it will be the 



Josiah Quincy, New England Aristocrat 73 

duty of some, to prepare definitely for a separation ; 
amicably if they can, violently if they must." 

The time of his Congressional service was dis- 
tinctly a war period; and in the face of impending 
war, the minority party is always in a difficult situa- 
tion, so loud is the demand upon it to bury principle 
under so-called patriotism. Mr. Quincy did not 
escape this dilemma of the minority leader, and it is 
too long after the events intelligently to weigh his 
conduct. On the whole it seems to have been wise ; 
and certainly it was always honorable. Opposing 
in every way the approaching conflict with Great 
Britain, which he rightly called a war of party, 
not of the nation, he yet alienated many of his 
Federalist friends by voting, when war seemed in- 
evitable, for troops and munitions. Determined not 
to lend himself, after it broke out, even to the dis- 
cussion of a conflict so obnoxious to his party, he 
nevertheless found himself impelled by events to 
speak; and with especial vigor he denounced and 
ridiculed that most fatuous of projects, the pro- 
posed invasion of Canada. This was almost his last 
speech in Congress; for, disgusted with the trend 
of politics, wearied with the futile labors of a minor- 
ity leader, Mr. Quincy had absolutely refused re- 
nomination. He therefore retired from Congress 
on March 4, 181 3, after eight years of service, leav- 
ing Washington, as he declared, "with the feeling 
of a man quitting Tadmor in the Wilderness, 'where 
creeping things had possession of the palaces, and 
foxes looked out of the windows.' " 

Retiring to Massachusetts, he watched, with 



74 New England Conscience 



gloomy eyes, the progress of the war, uttering in 
public speech and print warnings against the course 
of Madison's administration. Ten years before, 
just prior to his election to Congress, he had sat in 
the Senate of Massachusetts. In 1813, he was again 
elected to that body and served honorably until 
1820. But his boldness of speech and his independ- 
ence of mind, especially his opposition to his party's 
policy in regard to the separation of Maine from 
Massachusetts, so put him out of favor with the 
party leaders that he was flatly dropped by them in 
1820. So incensed were the voters of the party, 
however, by this action of its managers, that they 
took steps for Mr. Quincy to represent them in 
the lower house of the Legislature, putting him at 
the head of the ticket and electing him by a large 
majority. In the following year he was chosen 
Speaker of the State House of Representatives, an 
office which he was peculiarly fitted to adorn, and the 
year after was re-elected to the position. Before that 
session ended, however, he resigned from the Legis- 
lature to accept the office of Judge of the Municipal 
Court. 

From the National Congress to a municipal 
judgeship may seem a retrogression in public office; 
but it did not so appear to Mr. Quincy, who not 
only made any position which he chose to accept im- 
portant, but who sought this variety of official ex- 
perience as a physician or a lawyer seeks opportuni- 
ties of widening his professional view. He realized 
that he was taking part in the greatest political ex- 
periment which the world has ever seen ; he appreci- 



Josiah Quincy, New England Aristocrat 75 



ated that his generation would have exceptional 
power in the right shaping of that experiment; and 
he desired to see the working of it and to influence 
the trend of it upon as many sides as possible. 

Assisting, then, in both state and nation, in this 
early and pregnant translation of English into 
American forms and ideals of democracy, Josiah 
Quincy was next to take a vital part in that equally 
important process, the evolution of the New Eng- 
land town meeting into the administration of a 
modern city. 

In the long, varied and publicly important career 
of Mr. Quincy, nothing else he did was of so much 
consequence to his nation, nothing else he did has 
had such an influence upon the development of 
America, as the six years which he spent in the May- 
or's chair. The population of Boston, early in the 
nineteenth century, approached 40,000, and had 
quite outgrown the town-meeting system of ad- 
ministration. A nursing-mother to democracy as 
that system had been, Boston had become too big 
for it and needed new sources of political nourish- 
ment. So alive, however, were our forefathers to 
the importance of the town-meeting as an educator 
for citizenship, that for a number of years they put 
up with its inconveniences and even dangers, rather 
than enter upon untried paths. Mr. Quincy him- 
self opposed the city charter with much vigor, even 
to the time of its adoption ; but when the town 
was finally forced by the cumbersomeness of the old 
order to change its administration, it was plain to 
everyone, it was borne in upon Mr. Quincy him- 



76 New England Conscience 

self, that he alone of her citizens was fitted by 
position, temperament and knowledge of the situa- 
tion to undertake the difficult duties of transform- 
ing Boston from a country town into a metropolis. 
By a political combination, however, into which it 
is not necessary to enter, Mr, Quincy, after having 
consented to run for Mayor, found it expedient to 
vtithdraw his name in favor of his kinsman John 
Phillips, an honorable gentleman, who as first Maj'- 
or of Boston, performed in a dignified, though rath- 
er perfunctory way, the more obvious duties of his 
executive position. 

Mr. Phillips' health being impaired, he refused 
to stand for re-election; and, the complications of 
the previous year having been unravelled, Mr. 
Quincy was elected, without opposition, second 
Mayor of the city of Boston. And this was the 
situation which he found confronting him. He 
found Boston, — for those days a considerable city, 
— still being administered under village conditions. 
He found all the communal services, such as street- 
cleaning, entirely inadequate, because of the impossi- 
bility, under a town government, of securing the 
money needed for those services, and of administer- 
ing them in a centralized and economical way. He 
found, — for the reason that the business of the 
city had long outgrown the grasp of the town meet- 
ing, — much authority alienated from the citizens and 
vested in committees having undefined, and there- 
fore wholly uncertain, powers. And he found a 
large proportion of the inhabitants, in spite of the 
logic of the situation, still fiercely insistent upon 



Josiah Quincy, New England Aristocrat 77 

town-meeting methods and quite unwilling to trans- 
fer their allegiance to the officers created by the 
city charter. Himself but very recently an advocate 
of the town-meeting, a believer, theoretically, at 
least, that Vox popuU vox Del, Mr. Quincy had yet 
a mind so clear, a training for politics so thorough, 
a view into the future so keen, that he grasped the 
needs of the situation and saw matters so far gone 
into disorder and towards disintegration that there 
could be but one remedy, — a temporary, benevolent 
dictatorship. And fortunate for Boston that just 
at this point in her history she had at hand such a 
dictator as Josiah Quincy! Absolutely incor- 
ruptible, perfectly fearless, indefatigable, fond of 
minutiae, with a sternness of bearing and yet grace 
of manner enabling him to overrule much opposi- 
tion, he had also — what was essential at that junc- 
ture — the spirit and attitude of the English aristo- 
crat, of the ruler of men by the divine right of 
birth. Thus equipped, Mr. Quincy entered, in 
1823, upon his new and arduous duties; and in the 
six years of his incumbency he so wonderfully trans- 
formed this city as justly to deserve the title of 
"The Great Mayor." 

In the first place — and this, as his keen mind per- 
ceived, was essential to his success — he made him- 
self an autocrat by assuming the headship of prac- 
tically every committee of the administration. In 
his "Municipal History of Boston," he is careful 
to pay tribute to the zeal and wisdom of his associ- 
ates on the Board of Aldermen and City Council ; 
but it is clear in every act and speech of Mr. 



78 New England Conscience 



Quincy's that tliose bodies were but instruments 
serving to carry out his masterful and almost sov- 
ereign vi^ill. 

The first year of Mr. Quincy's incumbency was 
given mainly to questions of municipal housekeep- 
ing: to problems of cleaning the streets and yards. 
and of removing garbage and other nuisances. Such 
labor might be a fruitful theme, perhaps, for the 
poetic prose of Carlyle or the prosaic poetry of Walt 
Whitman ; but it is not the kind of work which 
makes great reputations. It is neither intellectually 
stimulating nor aesthetically refreshing. To every 
detail of the problem, however, Mr. Quincy gave 
the vigor of his unusual mind and the zeal of his 
extraordinary physical activity. How little the town 
had cared for such matters is shown by the fact 
that, until this first term of Mr. Quincy's, there 
had never been expended, in any year, over $1000 
for the cleaning of streets, the work of making them 
decent having been left to suburban farmers who 
cleaned when they felt like it, carried away only 
such dirt as seemed to them valuable, and used in the 
removal of this and the more noxious filth of the 
town open ox-teams whose slow progress through 
the streets was a saturnalia of nastiness. More- 
over, upon Mr. Quincy's inauguration, the responsi- 
bility for this part of the municipal housekeeping 
was divided among three independent boards, with 
uncertain and overlapping powers. By the end of 
his first year, however, the new Mayor had brought 
it about that he, with his Board of Aldermen, should 
have supreme control of the streets, and that the 



Josiah Quincy, New England Aristocrat 79 

Board of Health should have equal power over the 
household wastes; had banished the farmers and 
their oxen ; had given the city its first comprehensive 
cleaning with brooms, resulting in the collection of 
3CXX) tons of dirt; had made the care of the streets 
a definite and systematic work of the city perform- 
ed by its own men and wagons ; had decreed regula- 
tions looking to the regular and decent removal of 
garbage ; and had forced the farmers to wholesale 
and proper methods in the cleansing of the drains 
and cesspools. 

Thus fortunately were the conflicting authorities 
over the city's phj'sical health disposed of; but not 
so easily could he handle that old and firmly en- 
trenched board which supervised the city's moral 
health, — the Overseers of the Poor. To them Dr. 
Hale's definition of a board as a long, narrow body 
which never comes to a point, may well be applied. 
One of the hardest and most prolonged struggles 
of Mr. Quincy 's six years in office was with those 
Overseers, — estimable but unenlightened gentlemen 
who clung equally to personal authority and to 
antiquated methods of procedure. Under their 
regime, the city's poor, whether such by age and 
infirmity or by vice and crime, whether old men 
or boys, whether men or women, whether sick or 
well, were herded together in an outgrown build- 
ing upon Leverett Street. To supersede this, a 
more enlightened committee, in which Mr. Quincy 
had been active, had proposed the purchase of sixty- 
three acres of land in what was then the country 
region of South Boston, and the building thereon 



8o Netu England Conscience 

■- ''^^■ — '^^'■■ L ^iF " i>i ■ — -■■'■■■ »i I ■■'-■■■ » y ■■ — - ■■- — ■■■■.— .■i.»ii».-i 

of a house of industry, a house of correction and 
an institution for juvenile offenders, leaving the in- 
firm, respectable poor in the almshouse upon Lever- 
ett Street. It is not necessary to enter into the 
details of this long-drawn controversy in which 
Mr. Quincy finally triumphed ; but it is a struggle 
worthy of the pen of Dickens; and by following it 
one appreciates, as in no other way, the enormous 
strides which sociology in the last eighty years has 
made. 

One gets a view, too, of the change which has 
come over our cities through the increase of popula- 
tion and the influx of foreign immigration, when 
one reads that the entire police force at Mr. Quincy's 
command embraced twenty-four constables and 
eight night watchmen, of whom no more than eigh- 
teen were ever on duty at one time. Boston was 
then, indeed, in spite of its size, a village of Puri- 
tans, every householder constituting himself an of- 
ficer of the law in his house, in his shop, and even 
in the streets themselves. Nevertheless, a city with 
such a wide commercial horizon as Boston's could 
not be without at least some imported wickedness; 
and for the ill-disposed there had grown up a nest 
of evil houses with which the constabulary declared 
themselves powerless to cope. Mr. Quincy took 
the matter into his own hands and by the skillful 
resurrection of old statutes against fiddlers and tip- 
plers, suppressed the musicians who played for the 
lewd dancing, closed the saloons communicating with 
the evil houses, and thus brought to a quick ending 
this flaunting of vice in the face of decency, this 



Josiah Quincy, Netv England Aristocrat 8i 

threat to the lives of innocent passers-by. On the 
other hand, when a formidable body of so-called 
good citizens tried to suppress other disreputable 
places by mob violence, Mr. Quincy, hastily organ- 
izing the truckmen of the city — strong-handed and 
stout-hearted men — placed himself at their head 
and, at no little danger to himself, dispersed the 
rioters. Notwithstanding these incidents, the Mayor 
saw no reason to increase the constabulary during 
his term of office; but he made it more efficient by 
putting it under the single and responsible control 
of a City Marshal appointed by himself. 

The next reform undertaken by Mayor Quincy 
was the reorganization of the Fire Department. 
Impossible as it is now to imagine it, that city of 
nearly 50,000 inhabitants, with its buildings mainly 
of wood, was protected — or rather should one say 
unprotected — against loss by fire by fourteen old 
tubs without hose, worked by hand brakes, and kept 
filled by lines of volunteer citizens, who were ex- 
pected, upon an alarm of fire, to rush to the scene 
with leathern buckets for water and a canvas bag 
for loot. The fire companies were social rather 
than municipal organizations ; they were separately 
governed by "fire wards" chosen by popular vote ; 
their spirit was of rivalry as to which should get 
closest to the fire rather than as to which should 
save the most property; and as to the volunteer 
citizens, with their buckets and their bags, their 
running hither and thither, their dropping out of 
line whenever tired, their inclination rather to see 
the fun than to do the work, — one may faintly pic- 



82 New England Conscience 



ture what disastrous pandemonium they created at 
a fire in those days. 

New York and Philadelphia had for some time 
outgrown such provincialism, and had established 
a paid fire service controlled by a single responsible 
head, and equipped with engines of some power, 
using long lines of hose ; and Mr. Quincy, after 
having studied the methods of those cities, proposed 
a similar system for Boston. So sure were the fire 
companies, however, of their hold upon the populace 
that, by asking for more pay and privileges, they 
brought their power to an open test. The Mayor 
refusing to grant their demands, the entire force, 
upon a threatened day, resigned. Mr. Quincy im- 
mediately accepted their resignations, appointed 
loyal citizens in their places, and in a few hours 
created a new department. Having won this first 
victory, he followed up his advantage by submitting 
his plan for a new fire-service to the citizens, who, 
after much violent haranguing and many appeals to 
the spirit of ancient liberties, accepted it by a close 
vote, and the new order was at once inaugurated. 
Modern, convenient engine houses were built, the 
latest improved fire engines were ordered from New 
York, lengths of hose sufficient to do away with the 
absurd lines of citizens bought, and throughout the 
city were established huge cisterns for emergency 
water-supplies, cisterns wiiich were picturesquely de- 
nounced as "inverted monuments to Quincy's ex- 
travagance." 

The schools, also, engaged Mr. Quincy's earnest 
attention, and his son, in that admirable memoir of 



Josiah Quincy, New England Aristocrat 83 



him which is a model for biographers, declares that, 
during his father's administration, they were in 
better condition than they ever before had been. This, 
however, is but faint praise; for we know, from 
Horace Mann's reports, what general inefficiency 
characterized the public education of that time. 
From motives of economy Mr. Quincy took one dis- 
tinctly backward step in urging, and with his ac- 
customed mastery of the situation bringing about, 
the abolition of the Girls' High School. This school 
had been earnestly desired by the people, but, in 
Mr. Quincy's opinion, was far too great a burden 
upon the city, especially as it was attended mainly 
by the daughters of men, as he declared, amply able 
to pay for the private tuition of their daughters. 

The monumental work of Mayor Quincy's six 
administrations was, of course, the great market- 
house usually called by his name. The result of years 
of work, of finesse, of bold foresight met with every 
sort of denunciation and evil Insinuation, is best 
summarized in Mr. Quincy's own words: "A 
granite market house," he writes, "two stories high, 
five hundred and thirty-five feet long, fifty feet 
wide, covering twenty-seven thousand feet of land, 
including every essential accommodation, was erect- 
ed, at a cost of one hundred and fifty thousand 
dollars. Six new streets were opened and a seventh 
greatly enlarged, including one hundred and sixty- 
seven thousand square feet of land ; and flats, docks, 
and wharf-rights obtained, of the extent of one 
hundred and forty-two thousand square feet. All 
this was accomplished in the centre of a populous 



84 New England Conscience 



city, not only without any tax, debt, or burden 
upon its pecuniary resources, — notwithstanding, in 
the course of the operations, funds to the amount 
of upwards of eleven hundred thousand dollars had 
been employed, — but with large permanent additions 
to its real and productive property." 

But, as Mr. Quincy foresaw from the beginning 
and predicted in terms in his first inaugural, such 
dictatorship as his could not long be brooked by 
a population already uneasy under the changes from 
the old order and the increased taxation. Elected 
in the first place by a vote practically unanimous, 
the Mayor each year saw, as he expected, the opposi- 
tion polling a large and larger vote, until, at the 
end of his sixth term, it became plain that he could 
not be re-elected, and he refused, therefore, to be 
a candidate. The reaction earnestly fostered by the 
old fire companies, disgruntled boards and other 
malcontents had come, and the city, suffering one 
of those revulsions inevitable under popular govern- 
ment, went from bad to worse, until relief was 
sought in the Legislature. Unfortunately it has 
been sought there again and again until Boston 
has almost ceased to govern herself, the citizens 
weakly inviting the rule of men from other parts of 
Massachusetts rather than to take the trouble of 
reassuming the burden of self-government. 

Scarcely had he left the mayoralty than Mr. 
Quincy was elected to the presidency of Harvard 
University, in succession to Dr. Kirkland. While 
wholly honorable to himself and beneficial to the 
University, this part of Mr. Quincy's career was 



Josiah Quincy, New England Aristocrat 85 

probably the least important to history of adl his 
public service. The modem conception of a college 
president as a great educational administrator, as a 
high leader of thought, as a moulder of civic and 
national life, had not then arisen. Mr. Quincy 's 
genius, therefore, which would have eminently fit- 
ted him for such a role, could not at that time be 
of avail, for the conservatism of the community 
would not have permitted him thus to exercise it. 
On the other hand, he had not that peculiar genius 
as a leader of young men which distinguished such 
presidents as Mark Hopkins and Eliphalet Nott, 
men who made men by a sort of infusion into their 
pupils of their own great spirits. Rather did Mr. 
Quincy follow the traditional conception of a college 
presidency as a safe haven after the turmoils of 
public or ecclesiastical life, a haven in which a man 
of eminence might ride out, in dignified anchorage, 
his declining years. It is true that his successor, 
President Walker, called him the great organizer 
of the University; it is true that he did much to 
place the disordered finances of the University upon 
a sound and healthy basis ; it is true that he advocat- 
ed a certain freedom in study which has over-de- 
veloped itself into the present free elective system; 
it is true that he wrote a useful, if quite uninspired, 
history of the college; and it is eminently true that 
as a figure-head in the many semi-public functions 
in which Harvard properly takes a leading part, 
Mr. Quincy's patrician grace of form and bearing, 
and his dignity of manner made him honorably 
conspicuous. Moreover, he was active in building 



86 New England Conscience 

Gore Hall and in establishing the Observatory and 
the School of Law. Those, indeed, are his three 
chief monuments at the University; and it were, 
perhaps, ungrateful to ask larger memorials of his 
sixteen years in the Harvard presidency. 

In 1845, being then in his 74th year, Mr. 
Quincy retired from Harvard and prepared to en- 
joy in honored leisure his probably short remain- 
ing span of life. As it proved, however, he had 
still nineteen more years of usefulness; and these 
were beautifully spent by him in literary and 
agricultural pursuits; in occasional public appear- 
ances; especially in the calm role of a philosopher 
wise through age, serene through experience, to 
whom men gladly turn for counsel in perplexity, 
for admonition in their hot-headed haste. Spend- 
ing his winters in the comfortable Park Street 
house and his summers on his wide acres at Quincy, 
he walked slowly and always erect, clear-minded, 
sunny-tempered, down the autumn slope of life, 
death meeting him, in his ninety-third year, as the 
rich glow of the sunset meets and enwraps the travr 
eler whom we on the hill-top of middle life see one 
moment sharply limned against the sky and whom, 
the next moment, we lose in the deepening glory of 
the all-sheltering night. 

Some men are made great by the positions which 
they occupy; the positions which Josiah Quincy 
occupied were made great by him. It is easy to say 
that by joining the political majority his might have 
been a supreme national instead of a leading Massa- 
chusetts name; but the finest service that a man 



Josiah Quincy, New England Aristocrat 87 



can render in a republic is to be a true, an in- 
corruptible, an unswerving leader of the minority. 
Genuine criticism, honest opposition, courageous 
denunciation of the majority are the sine qua non 
of democratic government; and I do not hesitate 
to say that Quincy did ten times the service to his 
country in leading the opposition than he could have 
performed had he had all the hosts of Jefferson at 
his beck and call. 

It may be said again that his talents were too 
high for such places as a municipal judgeship and the 
mayoralty of a fledgling city. No man's talents 
are too high for the doing of any honorable work 
for his city or his State; and unless men of the 
stamp of Josiah Quincy learn this lesson, the Re- 
public which should be the anxious care of its best 
sons will fall a prey to its corruptest offspring. 
Again it may be said — and truly said — that in as- 
suming autocratic power as Mayor, Mr. Quincy 
gave a wrong impetus to municipal government, a 
trend from which our cities, with their bosses and 
their dependence upon State Legislatures, are to- 
day sadly suffering. But Mr. Quincy could not 
foresee this; he could only do, as he did, the work 
at hand in the best way at that time possible. The 
situation confronting him was so bad that only a 
dictatorship could remedy it; and he sacrificed his 
own peace, he sacrificed his popularity, in order to 
perform his duty. 

Duty, courage, probity, — these were the moral 
springs of his career. Were he standing on the 
floor of Congress bearding the vituperative Henry 



88 New England Conscience 

Clay, or were he listening to the plea of some 
police court outcast, his single aim was to achieve 
the right. Were he exposing, in bitter words, the 
true motives of the fiery slave-holders, or were he 
calmly disdaining their challenges to duel, his moral 
courage never flinched. In all his positions of trust, 
in all the large opportunities for good and for evil 
that came to him, his private interests never once 
eclipsed or even shadowed his clear vision of the 
public good. Of a noble race, he kept untarnished 
its great name. Heir to a conspicuous patriotism, he 
cherished and increased that splendid heritage. In 
his life he ennobled living; in his death he made 
dying beautiful ; in his varied work he demonstrated 
the high possibilities of intelligent and devoted 
citizenship; in the way that work was done, he set 
before the men of his and of every generation a 
standard which some have achieved and to which 
others may attain; but which few or none can sur- 
pass. 



The Shays Rebellion 89 



Thb Shays Rebellion 

THE final downfall of Shays', or, as it is 
more euphoniously termed, the Shays 
Rebellion, was almost coincident with 
the graduation from Harvard of John 
Quincy Adams. His mother, writing 
from London upon both events says: "I have never 
once regretted the resolutions (my son) took of 
quitting Europe, and placing himself upon the thea- 
tre of his own country; where, if his life is spared, 
I presume he will neither be an idle or even useless 
spectator. Heaven grant that he may not have 
more distressing scenes before him, and a gloomier 
stage to tread than those on which his father has 
acted for twelve years past. But the curtain rises 
before him; and instead of Peace waving her olive 
branch, or Liberty seated in a triumphal car, or 
Commerce, Agriculture, and Plenty pouring forth 
their stores. Sedition hisses. Treason roars. Rebel- 
lion gnashes her teeth, Mercy suspends the justly 
merited blow, but Justice strikes the guilty victims." 
Thus grandiloquently, but truly, does this liter- 
ary lady sum up this momentous episode in Ameri- 
can history, the incidents of which were trivial, 
sometimes even farcical; but the causes and effects 
of which are of deep significance in the development 
of the United States. 

Habitual novel readers are seldom disconcerted 



90 New England Conscience 



by the mishaps and sorrows of the successive chap- 
ters, because they feel certain that in the end the 
lovers will be united and live happily forever after. 
But those whose experience of life goes beyond the 
blissful last-chapter know that its genuine sorrows, 
— and also its enduring joys — are at that point only 
just beginning. So it is with the story of the Amer- 
ican Revolution as told in school-books, — many of 
which, by the way, are as ingeniously fictitious as is 
"The Prisoner of Zenda." The difficulties and 
dangers of that great struggle for independence are 
dwelt upon with a detail out of all historical propor- 
tion ; but when at last, worn out by the genius and 
persistency of Washington, the strength of the Brit- 
ish army surrenders at Yorktown, the infant mind 
is given to infer that, united in political matrimony, 
the states are now to live happily forevermore. As 
a matter of fact, however, the difficulties, the dan- 
gers, the political embarrassments of the Revolu- 
tion were really less than were those of the years 
following the surrender of Cornwallis and preced- 
ing the final and general adoption of the Constitu- 
tion. The real test of our moral strength as a peo- 
ple came then ; and that state which, on the whole, 
had to bear the severest strain, that state wherein 
a large proportion — possibly a majority — of the in- 
habitants were for many months ready to forswear 
democracy, that state whose disaflFection would have 
meant, probably, the dissolution of the union, was 
the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It is cus- 
tomary, I think, to regard the Shajrs Rebellion as a 
petty revolt of the camp-following of the disbanded 



The Shays Rebellion 91 



army, stirred up by paid agents of Great Britain. 
Another view regards it as an attempt of ambitious 
politicians to seize the government, an attempt, in 
the swelling periods of the historian of Worcester, 
"of loftier Catilines behind their humbler instru- 
ments." But the British agents seem to have been 
as mythical as the "British gold" of a later period ; 
and if there were Catilines, none of the many Cice- 
ros of that time arose to denounce them. Instead, 
it seems to me, this Rebellion represented a wide- 
spread and well-grounded disaffection of respecta- 
ble citizens, of tried soldiers, of serious persons with 
genuine grievances. Therefore, had its leaders 
equalled its rank and file, the state might easily 
have been overthrown. Fortunately for history, the 
Catilines so darkly hinted at did not appear. Though 
Shays' name is forever linked with this rebellion, it 
was because he and not a stronger man headed it, 
that law and order triumphed in the end. 

The close of the Revolution found the people of 
the United States united only in name; it found 
them dissevered from Great Britain but not \'et 
cemented among themselves; it found them, as was 
to be expected, demoralized by that social "Katzen- 
jammer" which always follows war. The wheels 
of normal industry had been stopped by war; the 
extraordinary industries and activities of war had, 
in turn, been stopped by peace; there was thus a 
doulile dislocation of trade and industry. The 
farmers, having tasted the life of city and of camp, 
were finding the drudgery of the fields irksome if 
not distasteful ; the young men, after the excitement 



92 New England Conscience 

of battle and the idleness of camps, were rebelling 
against the uneventful earning of their daily bread ; 
the soldiers in general, having long been supported 
hy a grateful people, were finding it hard to forage 
for themselves; above all, both soldiers and civilians, 
having learned, under the teaching of war, — that 
best friend of debtors, — how easy it is to borrow, 
and to postpone one's debts, were developing very 
hazy notions as to financial obligations and were 
coming to believe that freedom carries with it the 
right to free borrowing and unlimited expenditure. 
But the immediate close of the Revolution did 
not, as I think is generally believed, find the coun- 
try poor. Importation had, it is true, been largely 
suspended ; but that fact had but conserved the 
specie and built up crude domestic industries; tlie 
fisheries had been greatly interfered with, so that, 
for example, the whaling fleet of Nantucket had 
been reduced from 150 to only 19 sail; but it is 
fair to suppose that some part at least of this loss 
had been made good by privateering. The main 
reliance of the country had been, however, upon 
agriculture; and the war, far from stopping that, 
had given it an unusual market in the necessities 
of the army and the fleet. Moreover, by the exer- 
tions of our foreign representatives, a good deal of 
hard cash had come into the country from France, 
from Spain and from Holland, money for whose 
payment the country, it is true, stood pledged, but 
the reckoning day for which had not yet come. In 
this way, and through the French allies, with their 
large purchases of provisions and supplies, always 



The Shays Rebellion ' 93 

paid for in specie, there had been put into circula- 
tion probably a greater amount of gold and silver 
than the country ever before had seen. But this 
highly prosperous condition of the early 1780's 
served but to make more unbearable the distresses 
which so quickly and so inevitably follow^ed. I say 
inevitably, because at least three economic forces 
were at work to plunge the people, with extraordi- 
nary speed, from seeming riches into a poverty so 
harsh that it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that 
for months Massachusetts possessed scarcely a dollar 
of good money and hardly a dollar's worth of credit. 
These three forces were: first, the tremendous im- 
portations from abroad, which naturally followed 
peace, which had to be paid for in specie, and 
which, as they were only to a slight degree offset by 
exportations, quickly drained the country of its gold 
and silver; second, the proposed attempts to keep 
up a show of prosperity by issuing paper money and 
by making commodities a legal tender ; third, by the 
fact that the enormous debts contracted by the Con- 
tinental Congress, by the states, and by individuals, 
during the war, were rapidly coming due and were 
clamoring for payment. 

More, perhaps, than any other state, Massa- 
chusetts suffered by this economic crisis. Generous 
of men and supplies for the war, she had made a 
real effort to meet her obligations. On the other 
hand, through her coast cities, the chief American 
ports of entry, her specie, in the fever of importa- 
tion after the peace, had been the first to flee. And 
to meet this double drain she had almost no im- 



94 Nexv England Conscience 

mediate resources. Her manufactures, feeble, but a 
former main source of revenue, had been almost 
prostrated ; her fisheries languished ; worst of all, 
her shipping was still paralyzed by the commercial 
tyranny of England. For that country, beaten upon 
land, still ruled the sea, and by decreeing that only 
British vessels should bring goods to herself and 
to her colonies, had virtually closed all lucrative 
ports to the ships of the United States. As to the 
agriculture of Massachusetts, that was of little avail ; 
for then, as now, her rocky hillsides yielded better 
men than crops. 

During the heat of conflict, no promise had seem- 
ed too large to make, no stake too great to play for 
liberty ; and while all were busy with war none had 
claimed payment ; perhaps, in the generous fervor of 
the struggle, had not expected ever to enforce his 
claims. But by the year 1784 sentiment had dis- 
appeared ; these pledges which a desperate need had 
forced were pressing for redemption ; and the nation, 
the state, the individual had almost nothing with 
which to meet them. Under the articles of con- 
federation, the central government had no resources 
save such as might be granted by the individual 
states ; those states had, to be sure, the power of taxa- 
tion ; but the right to tax a people desperately poor, 
is but the power to incite rebellion. So denuded 
of every form of money had Massachusetts, by 1785, 
become ; so demoralized were her people by a war 
which was in itself a protest against taxation, that 
it became the rule not to pay one's taxes, and he 
who did so was looked upon as an eccentric idealist, 



The Shays Rebellion 95 



comparable perhaps to the modern citizen who freely 
and honestly declares his personal estate. 

With a debt to the Congress of over five millions, 
with a debt on her own account of over four mil- 
lions, and owing her own soldiers seven hundred 
thousand more, Massachusetts would have been fool- 
ish to enforce the taxation necessary to meet these 
obligations. At that time the only form of tax was 
a direct one ; to have collected it would have meant 
a squeezing of fifty dollars out of every man, woman 
and child in the state, it would have meant, accord- 
ing to a trustworthy contemporary, a confiscation 
of at least one third of the total income of the state's 
inhabitants. "How absurd," writes a newspaper 
correspondent signing himself "Farmer," "are the 
tax collector's calls for twenty dollars at a time 
when that is more money than we ever see." What 
made this impossible taxation doubly galling was the 
fact that it represented, in the graphic Yankee slang, 
"Payment for a dead horse." Most of the state and 
national debt was due for the expenses of the war, 
an event now past and the fruits of which seemed 
already dubious. That, then, the authorities of 
Massachusetts made only feeble attempts to collect 
the revenue, that there was agitation for the aboli- 
tion of the direct tax, that there was clamor for the 
immediate sale of the public lands in the province of 
Maine (a project more easily proposed than carried 
out), that a large party demanded repudiation of 
the public debts, and that a still more formidable 
body called for that perennial quack medicine, pa- 
per money, was, under the circumstances, only to be 



96 New England Conscience 



expected. And all this agitation over the taxes took 
on a personal aspect from the fact that among the 
largest creditors of the government were, on the one 
hand, the veterans of the war, holding notes for their 
wages; and, on the other, speculators who had ex- 
ploited the soldiers' poverty by buying up these notes 
at a ruinous discount. These speculators, many 
persons claimed, the government had no obligation, 
and no right, to pay. 

But, while the state authorities and the Congress 
would not and could not force the people to pay 
their taxes, private debts were quite another matter. 
Private debts had behind them real flesh-and-blood, 
impatient creditors, a host of lawyers eager to bring 
action, courts to sustain those actions, laws of at- 
tachment and sale to satisfy them, and jails open 
to punish the debtor who would not or whose prop- 
erty could not liquidate the debt. The horrors 
of debtors' prisons were then unspeakable; yet into 
them were thrown, by due process of law, men who 
had fought for the country, men who stood highest 
in their several communities, men whose very devo- 
tion and self-sacrifice, whose very trust in the state, 
had brought them to this wretched pass. In the 
face of many such instances, with the courts crowd- 
ed with suits — in 1784, for example, Worcester 
County, with a population of 50,CXX), saw 2,000 ac- 
tions for debt, and a single attorney brought lOO 
actions in but a single court — what wonder that law- 
yers were denounced as tools of tyranny and the 
courts before which they plead as monstrous agents 
for devouring the poor? Moreover, the traditions 



The Shays Rebellion 97 

of England were still potent in her late colonies, 
distinctions of "classes" and "masses" were marked, 
and there seemed good reason to fear that the gentry 
would claim public office as their prerogative and 
would use the power thus gained to build up a 
landed aristocracy. This fear was magnified, in 
Massachusetts, by the fact that the seat of govern- 
ment was at Boston, the centre of wealth and of 
colonial power, but not the geographical centre of 
the state. This unsuitability of Boston for the Cap- 
ital, Springfield and Worcester were quick to point 
out and eager to enlarge upon. 

Loud and louder grew the cry of complaint from 
those who, in imitation of the French, were pleased 
to style themselves the "People." Is it for poverty 
and hardship such as this that we fought during all 
those bitter years? Have we freed ourselves from 
a tyrannical king only to find ourselves bound hand 
and foot by pressing debts and an impossible taxa- 
tion? Are we simply running from the distant 
oppression of England into the immediate bondage 
of lawyers with high fees and courts with power 
to sell a man's all and to imprison him in a pest- 
hole if the debt be not then discharged? If this be 
liberty, give us license, and that we may enjoy 
license, away with courts and law! 

Almost equal to that against the law, was the 
outcry against luxury. The newspapers of the daj, 
precursors of our more modern "Transcript," were 
full of letters denouncing the wearing of foreign 
gew-gaws and the eating of strange, superfluous 
dishes. No modern Puritan scoring the vanities of 



98 New England Conscience 

the Metropolitan Opera House, is half so fiery as 
were those old fellows, who signed themselves 
Publicus, Senex, and the like, and who attributed 
all the sorrows of the nation to miss's ribands and 
madam's satin gown. Moved by these denuncia- 
tions, the ladies of Boston, as usual, started a club 
for the discouragement of luxurious living; but, 
as a contemporary writer goes out of his way to 
remark, "they produced by so doing little allevia- 
tion of the general distress." 

While, however, the good ladies were of their 
own choice donning homespun, the lawyers, with- 
out their own consent, were being summarily dealt 
with. The people attacked them at the most obvi- 
ous point by depriving them of office, by driving 
them from that public life in which, theretofore, 
they had been the principal actors. It is bad enough, 
the rural, and especially the western rural voters 
said, to have the General Court meet in Boston, 
that purse-proud seat of gentility, to which it is so 
long and so expensive a journey for our representa- 
tives to go, and where they are subject to the wiles 
and temptations of a corrupt metropolis ; but at 
least we can exclude these greedy lawyers from the 
halls of legislation, sending there instead our in- 
corruptible selves. So the General Court of 1785 
contained scarcely a lawyer, being made up almost 
wholly of new and untried men. This action, how- 
ever, gave the wicked attorneys but the more leisure, 
and made them but the more eager, to secure fees. 

There is reason to suspect that Hancock — shrewd 
politician that he was, — foresaw the coming storm; 



The Shays Rebellion 99 

for in 1785 he resigned the governorship. His plea 
was ill-health ; and it is true that his contemporaries 
describe him (though he was less than fifty years 
old) as a feeble, wasted old man; but had the 
times been less troubled and the outlook for de- 
mocracy more rosy, it seems unlikely that he would 
have resigned an office that pointed so directly 
towards the goal of his ambition, the soon-to-be - 
created Presidency. At the April election following, 
the people were unable to choose a successor; there- 
fore the selection fell into the General Court, and 
from the list sent up to the Senate by the House the 
former body chose, wisely as it would afterwards 
appear, James Bowdoin. But it was a selection far 
from agreeable to a large number of persons in 
Massachusetts, for Bowdoin was regarded as dis- 
tinctly of the aristocratic party, quite out of sym- 
pathy with the people's grievances. Moreover, his 
only daughter had married Sir John Temple, a 
Boston boy by birth, but a British aristocrat by in- 
heritance. During the first year of Bowdoin's ser- 
vice, the situation, both political and financial, was 
growing ever more alarming ; nevertheless no overt 
act was done, and in the spring of 1786 the governor 
was reelected by a considerable popular majority. 
In August of that year, however, the widespread 
discontent at last took shape in various conven- 
tions which, representing in some instances as many 
as fifty towns, met at various places in Worcester, 
Middlesex and Bristol counties. These assemblages 
were orderly and their members were, in the main, 
sober and thoughtful persons. Conducted with 



lOO New England Conscience 

parliamentary form and keeping in communication 
with one another, after the manner of the earlier 
committees of correspondence, these conventions 
first solemnly declared themselves constitutional and 
then, with equal gravity, made demands upon the 
General Court which, if granted, would have de- 
stroyed the constitution of the state. 

The grievances set forth by these gatherings vary 
in character and in number; but the main objects 
of their attack were the fees and practices of the 
lawyers, the Courts of common pleas and general 
sessions of the peace, the burdensome taxes and 
methods of taxation, the excessive salaries of govern- 
ment officials (especially the £iioo received by the 
governor himself), the meeting of the General Court 
at Boston, the tendency towards an office-holding 
aristocracy, and, worst of all, the scarcity of money 
and the collapse of credit. The remedies proposed 
for the money-famine would be funny had they 
not been so serious and did not most of them still 
survive, a standing menace to our industrial life. 
The favorite panacea was a paper money with a 
fixed ratio of depreciation by which its value would 
be gradually less until, at the end of ten or twenty 
years, its worth would wholly vanish. This, as 
anyone without common sense can easily see, would 
relieve all debtors of their obligations without need 
of any exertion upon their part. 

Much as these conventions might elaborate or 
sub-divide their grievances, there were fundamental- 
ly, however, only two : the excessive taxation, and 
the scarcitv of monev. Both these evils were but 



The Shays Rebellion lOl 



the natural result of such a war as the American 
Revolution, and their only cure was to be found 
in patience, frugality, industry and mutual forbear- 
ance. To preach these admirable virtues, however, 
to men on the verge of starvation and threatened 
with a debtor's prison, was to ask self-denial of the 
famished tiger. Here were the hard facts : taxes 
which they could not meet, debts which they could 
not pay, jails to rot in if they did not pay. But 
taxes, debts, jails would be powerless to reach them 
without the action of the courts. Ergo, stop the 
Courts; at least until the Legislature should have 
had opportunity to consider and to redress their 
wrongs. So, in that same August, while the sev- 
eral conventions were putting their grievances upon 
paper, 1500 men at Northampton put theirs into 
action by assembling and overawing the courts into 
an immediate adjournment. 

This was a step so subversive of the state that 
Governor Bowdoin at once issued a stirring proc- 
lamation calling upon all officers and good citizens 
to protect the judges, and commanding the Gen- 
eral Court to convene in special session on Septem- 
ber 27th. 

Pending this coming together of the Legislature 
three other sessions of the courts were to be holden, 
the first at Worcester, on September 5. To pro- 
tect this sitting, the militia of the County were 
ordered out; but some flatly refused; others excused 
themselves, like the wedding guests of the parable; 
and those who responded were but half-hearted in 
their work. Therefore the "Regulators," as they 



I02 New England Conscience 

now called themselves, led by Adam Wheeler of 
Hubbardston, had no difficulty in virtually taking 
possession of the town. To the number of about 
300, with sprigs of evergreen in their hats and with 
a pine tree for a standard, they surrounded the 
court-house and, when the judges appeared to open 
court, confronted them at the door with bayonets. 
General Ward, the chief justice, met them like a 
soldier, harangued them upon their wickedness, 
would answer no man till he knew his name and 
residence, and metaphorically bared his bosom to 
the steel. Nevertheless, he and his associates final- 
ly retired to a private house and, after a day or two 
of fruitless parleying, adjourned the Court to a 
more propitious season. 

No shots were exchanged between the rioters and 
the representatives of order: but there was mucli 
bandying of words. The sheriff of Worcester, find- 
ing one of their grievances to be his alleged high 
fees, told them, with much spirit, that if this were 
their complaint they need trouble themselves no 
longer, for he would gladly hang them all for noth- 
ing. 

The success of the "regulators" at Worcester oc- 
casioned the keenest anxiety over the next sessions 
of the Courts, which were to be held, all on Sep- 
tember 12, at Great Barrington, Taunton, and 
Concord. At Taunton the dignity of the state was 
maintained by the vigor of General Cobb, who, 
practically against the Governor's orders, paraded 
the militia and saved the court from insult, though 
the judges deemed it prudent to adjourn. At Great 



The Shays Rebellion 103 



Barrington and Concord, however, what a travesty 
of official dignity was seen! At the former town, 
the militia general, seeing the rioters assembled in 
force, proposed, like a true officer of opera bouffe. 
that the question of the sitting of the courts be put 
to popular vote, those in favor to gather on one 
side of the road and those opposed on the other. 
This remarkable referendum resulted as was to be 
expected : the Courts showed but a beggarly hand- 
ful of adherents, and the wise general retired with 
a whole skin and doubtless delighted with his pow- 
ers of strategy. 

Concord made hardly a better showing. The 
Governor, distracted by a multitude of counsels, was 
on the whole disposed to display the full power of 
the state; but a self-constituted committee of 24 
towns dissuaded him, assuring him that they would 
carry out instead a conciliatory policy sure to suc- 
ceed. So the orders for the assembling of the militia 
were countermanded and, on the morning when 
the court was to convene, the committee began its 
noble work of moral suasion. First it met at the 
meeting-house, and, after prayer by Dr. Ripley, 
declared itself, quite unnecessarily, a constitutional 
assembly. It then appointed two sub-committees: 
one to wait upon the insurgents who, under the 
leadership of Job Shattuck, a loud-mouthed dema- 
gogue, were parading about the town ; the other 
to wait upon the judges, gathered somewhat timor- 
ously in Jones' tavern, to tell them what the com- 
mittee was going to do for them, — for which in- 
formation the judges declared themselves truly 



I04 New England Conscience 



grateful. 

Although the first sub-committee labored till 
quarter past three o'clock, all they could get from 
Shattuck and his crew were two manifestos: the first 
that the "voice of the people" forbade the Courts 
to meet; the second that they might meet and ad- 
journ, provided they went not near the court-house; 
replies which, it is stated, "pained the committee." 
Meanwhile the leaders of the mob were making 
various braggart threats that all not joining them 
would be run out of town at the point of the bayonet 
or, as one authority has it, would be "put to the 
sword." "The time has come," shouted Shattuck, 
"to sweep away all debts!" "Oh yes, Job," drawled 
a voice from the crowd, "We know all about them 
two farms you can't never pay for." 

Meanwhile other insurgents had come in from 
Worcester County and, all eloquent with New 
England rum, paraded before Jones' tavern, utter- 
ing threats and curses. Finally Dr. Bartlett, of the 
sub-committee which in the morning had waited 
upon the judges to tell them how much was to be 
done for them, was deputed to go out and to inform 
the rioters, with due deference, that the court had 
decided not to sit. 

This wretched fiasco had several results: it 
roused the citizens of Boston to the holding of meet- 
ings in support of the government, and to the send- 
ing of an address, truly step-motherly in its scorn 
and admonition, to the other towns. It also showed 
the insurgents that, having gone thus far, they must, 
to save their necks, go farther, and control, if they 



The Shays Rebellion 105 



could, the Supreme Court; for therein lay, of 
course, the power to indict them. Therefore, in late 
September, the "regulators" assembled in force at 
Springfield, where the Supreme Court was to sit; 
and, while they did not prevent it from convening, 
they virtually controlled its action and secured from 
it an early adjournment. Here at Springfield met 
for the first time the two chief leaders; on the one 
side. General Shepard, whose vigor at a later date 
was to kill the insurrection, and on the other, Daniel 
Shays, whose name has gained a bad eminence which 
his ability did not really earn. Shays had been a 
captain in the Revolution, and seems to have been 
a good recruiting officer. He was, however, quite 
incompetent for leadership, and spent, apparently, 
more time in excusing himself than in trying to jus- 
tify his cause. He was far more respectable, how- 
ever, than were Shattuclc, Parsons and most of the 
other leaders whose names have sunk into deserved 
oblivion. 

Meanwhile, the General Court had come together 
at Boston. Stiffened by the pronounced loyalty of 
that city, by the comparative vigor of the Governor, 
and by fear for its own existence, it proceeded to 
enact some really wise and dignified legislation. 

It passed a riot act, involving confiscation of prop- 
erty, whipping and imprisonment; and on the other 
hand an act of indemnity to those who would take 
the oath of allegiance before the end of the year; 
a judiciary act extending the powers of justices of 
the peace, thereby reducing the cost of suits of law; 
an impost and excise tariff intended to relieve in 



lo6 I^ew England Conscience 



some measure the burden of direct taxation ; and 
a measure for the sale by lottery of the public lands 
in Maine. After a long conflict between the demo- 
cratic house and the aristocratic senate, it also tem- 
porarily suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus. It 
did not, much to its credit, give in to the popular 
clamor for paper money, although it passed a tem- 
porary tender act; and, best of all, it issued an 
Address to the People, in which the political and 
economic situation was explained and justified in a 
really masterly manner. This address was to be 
read in all the churches on Thanksgiving Day. In 
short, by word and by deed the legislature supported 
the Governor and the militia in all that they had 
done. 

No sooner, however, had the General Court ad- 
journed, just before Thanksgiving, than it became 
evident that both its strength as shown in its coer- 
cive laws and its supposed weakness as shown in the 
bill of amnesty, had but served more fully to in- 
flame the people. Conventions of the towns imme- 
diately met, framing new grievances and accusing 
the legislature of lack of understanding of and sym- 
pathy with the populace; the courts were again 
stopped, or forced to adjourn ; and scarcely a rioter 
condescended to avail himself of the privilege of 
pardon. It is little exaggeration to say that, 
throughout December, the State, west of Middlesex 
county, was practically in the possession of the mob. 
The insurrection in Middlesex, however, had been 
absolutely broken up by the high sheriff who, sup- 



The Shays Rebellion 107 

ported by a Boston troop of light horse under Col. 
Hichborn and another from Groton under Col. 
Wood, had captured Shattuck and the other leaders 
and had clapped them into Suffolk jail. 

Shays, meanwhile, had taken up his headquarters 
at Rutland, 12 miles from Worcester, in some bar- 
racks of the Revolution ( probably those in which the 
prisoners from Burgoyne's army were so long con- 
fined, and the well for which still exists) and there 
General Rufus Putnam frequently visited him, try- 
ing, in vain, to turn him from the error of his ways. 
From this hill-top, Shays and his followers, made 
more desperate by the unusual severity of the winter 
and the inhospitality of the Rutland folk, kept 
pouncing upon Worcester; and he became at last so 
menacing that the sheriff declared himself power- 
less to protect the December sitting of the court, 
which was therefore ordered adjourned to January. 
Moreover, Shays repeatedly threatened to march 
upon Boston and rescue Shattuck, urging the disaf- 
fected everywhere to meet him there. This stirred 
Boston to the depths, placed her for some weeks 
under martial rule, with sentries in her streets and 
cannon upon Fort Hill, and impelled the Governor 
to make real preparations for stamping out what was 
now seen to be serious and widespread rebellion. As 
commander-in-chief, he ordered 4,400 militia to 
take the field for 30 days, placed General Benja- 
min Lincoln in command of them, and made certain 
their pay and sustenance, — the state treasury being 
empty and its credit nil, — by loans from public- 



lo8 New England Conscience 

spirited citizens.* 

In addition to ordering out the militia, Gov- 
ernor Bowdoin publicly besought the aid of the 
people in restoring order, and privately, through 
General Knox, the Secretary of War, arranged for 
the intervention of the Federal Government. So 
jealous were the states, however, of such interfer- 
ence, that the Congress had to mask its purpose 
by calling for troops to serve against the North- 
West Indians. 

General Lincoln's little army rendezvoused at 
Roxbury on January 19, 1787, and, marching im- 
mediately to Worcester, reached there on the 22d, 
effectively protecting the sitting of the courts. For 
Shays, knowing the militia to be on the march, had 
shifted his ground to Springfield, where he hoped 
to gain possession of the government arsenal. He 
appeared there in force on the day that Lincoln 
reached Worcester. In command at Springfield 
was General Shepard, whom Shays' forces had 
earlier, as will be remembered, bloodlessly en- 
countered. Under Shepard, however, were but 
1 100 militia, while against him were now arrayed 
not only Shays' 11 00 insurgents on the east of the 
city, but also 400 more under Day, on the west, 
and at least 400 more from Berkshire, under Eli 



*A curious side-light is thrown upon this matter of 
the state's credit by the fact that Jacob Kuhn, the cus- 
todian, or janitor, of the State House, could secure 
wood for the winter's session of the legislature only 
by pledging his personal credit, none being willing to 
trust the State itself. 



The Shays Rebellion 109 



Parsons, on the north. On the 24th, Shays notified 
Day that he proposed to attack General Shepard 
on the following morning, and asked for Day's 
cooperation. Whether Day was really not ready, 
or whether he hoped to capture Shepard all by him- 
self, does not appear. But he returned answer to 
Shays that he could not fight until the 26th. This 
letter, fortunately for the militia, was intercepted. 
Shays came in on the 25th, therefore, fully expect- 
ing Day to appear from the opposite side of the 
city, in his support. 

As Shays' forces approached the arsenal, Shep- 
ard sent him formal warning that he would be 
fired upon did he continue to advance. This pro- 
ducing no effect, Shepard ordered his one field piece 
(familiarly known as the "government's puppy") 
to be fired above the heads of the insurgents. But 
still they marched steadily forward until within a 
hundred and fifty yards of the militia. Therefore, 
performing, as he afterwards said, the hardest duty 
that was ever his, Shepard ordered the gun trained 
full upon these deluded men, many of whom had 
been his tried comrades throughout the Revolution. 
But this bitter medicine was what the social disease 
of rebellion needed. Screaming "murder" and 
leaving three men dead and one mortally wounded, 
Shays' army fled, and in such disorder that had not 
the militia general been as temperate as he was firm, 
he might have slaughtered the greater part of it. 
For another anxious day he guarded the arsenal, 
expecting every moment the approach of the united 
forces of Shays, Day and Parsons ; but on the second 



no New England Conscience 

morning relief came. Lincoln's little army ap- 
peared and took command of the city, while Shep- 
ard's force went up the river to scatter the already 
demoralized rebels. From point to point he drove 
them, until Shays and his remnant of revolt made a 
stand upon one of the high hills of Pelham. 

In the meantime the news of Shepard's alarming 
position had reached Middlesex, and 2000 militia, 
under General Brooks, had been ordered to his re- 
lief ; but they had gone only a few miles when news 
of the rout of Shays returned them, reluctant at 
losing the chance to fight, to their homes. 

Following up the victory at Springfield, General 
Lincoln invested — if one may use so large a term — 
Shays' force at Pelham, and summoned him to sur- 
render in a letter so admirable and so rarely terse, 
as to rank as a State Paper: 

* "Whether you are convinced or not of your 
errour in flying to arms, I am fully persuaded that 
before this hour, you must have the fullest con- 
viction upon your own minds, that you are not able 
to execute your original purposes. 

"Your resources are few, your force is incon- 
siderable, and hourly decreasing from the disaffec- 
tion of your men ; you are in a post where you have 
neither cover nor supplies, and in a situation in 
which you can neither give aid to your friends, nor 
discomfort to the supporters of good order and gov- 
ernment. . . . Under these circumstances, you 



*Minot's "History of the Insurrections," Worcester, 
1788; P. 118. 



The Shays Rebellion 1 1 1 



cannot hesitate a moment to disband your deluded 
followers. If you should not, I must approach, and 
apprehend the most influential characters among 
you. Should you attempt to fire upon the troops 
of government, the consequences must be fatal to 
many of your men the least guilty. To prevent 
bloodshed, you will communicate to your privates, 
that if they will instantly lay down their arms, 
surrender themselves to government, and take and 
subscribe the oath of allegiance to this Common- 
wealth, they shall be recommended to the General 
Court for mercy. If you should either withhold 
this information from them, or sufiFer your people to 
fire upon our approach, you must be answerable for 
all the ills which ma'»' exist in consequence thereof." 
Shays' letter in reply "bade defiance," as a con- 
temporary remarked, "alike to government, to 
grammar and to spelling." He asked for time, on 
the ground that petitions for redress and pardon had 
been despatched to the General Court. Under cover 
of a parley, however, he withdrew his men to Peters- 
ham, where, seemingly, quarters and supplies were 
more plenty than at Pelham. General Lincoln, who 
was then at Hadley, heard a rumor of this change 
of base at three o'clock on February' 3rd. The 
rumor was not confirmed, however, until six; and 
his army could not be got under way till eight. 
The evening was warm ; but about midnight came 
up a New England northeast wind, with driving 
snow and piercing frost. In a country devoid, as 
this then was, of shelter, the only hope of life lay 
in keeping on the march. So Lincoln's little army, 



112 New England Conscience 



suffering horribly, kept on, covered the whole thi*rt\' 
miles, over snow^-piled roads, in thirteen hours, and 
arrived at Petersham, with every man more or less 
frost-bitten and not a few left frozen on the way, 
at nine the next morning. Shays' men, well hous- 
ed, well fed, might easily have destroyed this wretch- 
ed company; but, utterly taken by surprise, they 
simply fled, leaving their good quarters and their 
steaming rations for their enemy's relief, This 
dramatic and truly heroic march saw the real end 
of the Rebellion ; though, as in all such contests, 
the mob, broken up into small parties, growing more 
and more desperate, more and more forgetful of the 
difference (if there be any) between warfare and 
brigandage, continued to harass western Massachu- 
setts for many a month to come. Indeed the great- 
est loss of life on both sides and the most serious 
battle of all — that of Sheffield, in Berkshire Coun- 
ty — took place after Shays' flight from Petersham ; 
but these were isolated riots, not organized rebellion, 
and involved no serious menace to the state's au- 
thority. 

The leaders and many of the rank and file fled, 
under General Lincoln's active pursuit, to the sur- 
rounding states; and a most amusing correspond- 
ence, throwing a flood of light upon interstate jeal- 
ousies, took place between Governor Bowdoin and 
their several Governors. Connecticut and New- 
Hampshire, (the latter having had a serious in- 
surrection of her own) cooperated willingly with 
Massachusetts, treating her renegades as their out- 
laws too. New York, however, always arrogantly 



The Shays Rebellion 113 

self-sufficient, would take no decided stand until 
the insurgents began to make trouble within her 
own borders; when she promptly came over and did 
good serv'ice in the Berkshire riots. Rhode Island 
(or, as she was then always called by her loving 
sister states. Rogue's Island) openly rejoiced in our 
discomfiture and elected one of our worst rioters 
to her legislature. The Governor of Vermont, 
after circumlocution worthy of the Empress Do- 
wager of China, finally declared that he would take 
no harsh action against our refugees who had sought 
shelter in his state, because he "could not aflFord 
to discourage immigration." 

This scattered rebellion was thus long kept up, 
partly with the desperation of men who know 
themselves to be outlaws and who rather enjoy the 
license which it gives ; partly in hope of frightening 
the citizens into redressing their alleged griev- 
ances; partly in the belief that the change of gov- 
ernment which is almost sure to follow disorder 
might spare their threatened necks. In this last 
expectation they were, as any student of democratic 
institutions knows, quite fully justified. For Gov- 
ernor Bowdoin and his associates had put down re- 
bellion ; but they had ruined their political careers. 
Their harsh measures had been effective, but, of 
course, not popular. Bowdoin had never been really 
acceptable save in Boston ; and, besides taking, 
finally, strong steps to smother insurrection, he had 
vetoed a popular measure, — that for reducing his 
own salary. He based his veto on constitutional 
grounds; but this act destroyed whatever popularity 



114 New England Conscience 



he before possessed. Therefore, in the early spring 
of 1787, Hancock decided that the time had come 
to recover from his painful illnesses; and in the be- 
lief, which he took pains not to discourage, that he 
would cure the social distresses of the time, he was 
overwhelmingly elected, over Bowdoin, to the gov- 
ernorship. With Hancock came in also another 
almost untried House of Representatives, men be- 
lieved to be more favorable to the popular cause. 

Both to the old and to the new legislature fell 
a hard and thankless task : that of dealing with once 
trusted citizens who had been in open revolt. And 
as was to be expected, both made equally sorry work 
of it. Prudence warned them to be lenient; fear 
impelled them to be stern ; so they were first too 
stern and then, frightened by popular clamor, too 
lenient. Very elaborate acts of disqualification were 
passed, but it does not appear that, in the end any 
one was really disqualified from the rights of citizen- 
ship. Fourteen persons were convicted of treason 
and were sentenced to death ; but the only indi- 
vidual who seems to have had anything happen to 
him was a member of the House of Representatives 
who was actually made to sit upon the gallows with 
a rope around his neck and to pay a fine of 50 
pounds. All the rest, even Shays, Day, Parsons, 
^Vheeler and Shattuck, either were pardoned or 
were allowed to live undisturbed in some state 
across the border. Shays died, many years later and 
in great poverty, at Sparta, N. Y. 

So with ever lessening echoes of scattered disor- 
der, ended the greatest rebellion against her au- 



The Shays Rebellion 115 

thority that our commonwealth has ever seen. In 
this day of large things, the debts which were its 
fundamental cause seem as trivial as the petty fights 
which marked its course. But if one projects him- 
self into that time of small things and rids him- 
self of his present knowledge of what this state and 
what democracy have done, this event then becomes 
as portentous to us as it was to the statesmen of 
the time. To them a million dollars was enormous ; 
they saw the mountain of debt, but could not dream 
of the resources beyond ; they had proclaimed a re- 
public, but had no assurance from history that a 
democracy such as this could hold together for ten 
years; they had still to work out the vast fabric 
of the constitution ; they had as yet no finance, no 
trade, practically no manufactures. Thus naked 
of resources and of political experience, what won- 
der that many of them saw in the Shays Rebel- 
lion the opening scene of general anarchy, the pref- 
ace to an utter downfall of democracy. Changing 
thus our view-point, we too see what a crisis in the 
history not only of Massachusetts but of the nation 
this Shays Rebellion was, and we wonder, not that 
our great-grandfathers made so many mistakes in 
handling it, but that they made so few. Perhaps 
we are ready, too, to agree with him who called 
the quelling of the Shays Rebellion one of "the 
twelve great campaigns of history." 

This Rebellion taught our forefathers at least two 
things: first, that the states must bind themselves 
together by some stronger bond than the Articles 
of Confederation ; second, that they must deal stem- 



Ii6 Neiv England Conscience 

ly with disobedience to organic law. Said Samuel 
Adams, in opposing pardon to the convicted leaders 
of the insurrection: "In monarchies, the crime of 
treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned ; 
but the man who dares to rebel against the laws of 
a republic ouj^ht to suffer death." That first les- 
son which the state and the country learned hast- 
ened, without a doubt, the adoption of the Consti- 
tution ; and that second lesson has been slowly teach- 
ing our lawmakers to make ever wiser distinctions 
between liberty^ a social good which cannot be too 
widely extended, and license, a social ill which can- 
not be too sternly repressed. 



Destruction of the Ursuline Convent 1 17 



VI 
The Destruction of the Ursuline Convent 

AT ChARLESTOWN, MASSACHUSETTS, 1 834 

R RELIGIOUS riot in Boston within 
living memory seems, in these days of 
toleration, almost incredible. To a dis- 
belief at the time in the possibility of 
such a disaster and to a failure, there- 
fore, to take proper precautions, the burning of the 
Ursuline Convent in Charlestou^n, on the night of 
August II, 1834, was mainly due. But the frenzy 
of the mob and the supineness of the onlookers had 
a deeper origin still in that general law which so 
often controls the acts of mankind, the Law of 
Crowds. This law — of which Gustave Le Bon 
has given so excellent a demonstration — causes men 
in masses to act either much worse or much better 
than they would as individuals. Over and over 
again histor}- has shown that when a number of 
persons are gathered together, whether m an ordin- 
ary' mob, a convention, a legislative assembly, or an 
audience of any kind; or when otherwise unrelated 
persons are held together by political, religious or 
social beliefs, forming them into parties, sects or 
castes, — the action of men so formed into a crowd 
is in many cases entirely different from what one's 
experience of them as individuals would lead one 
to expect. Shielded and made nameless by surround- 
ing numbers the individual loses his fear of con- 



Ii8 New England Conscience 

sequences, his sense of accountability, in no small 
degree his individuality itself. Thus transformed, 
he becomes, as it were, but an atom in the crowd- 
mass, moving as it moves, feeling as it feels, acting 
as it acts. The higher powers of the man, those of 
reason and judgment, give place to the lower ones, 
those of instinct and emotion; and these instincts 
and emotions, acting and reacting one upon another, 
are intensified sometimes to a pitch of frenzy, so 
that persons who, under ordinary conditions, are 
sober, law-abiding and cautious in behavior, will, in 
a crowd, commit acts of heroism or of brutality 
seemingly impossible. Whether their deeds be heroic 
or bestial depends wholly upon the direction in 
which their instincts and emotions are impelled. 
For a crowd is swayed in one or all of three ways: 
by a dramatic event ; by a fixed idea which has been 
built up through years or even through generations; 
or by an individual who has power of emotional 
leadership. To one or all of these things a crowd 
will yield itself much as the hypnotized patient yields 
to the hypnotizer; and, under the suggestions of 
that idea or leader or event, will go to almost any 
length of sublimity or infamy. Such a crowd will 
march undismayed against an overwhelming foe, will 
slaughter its dearest friends, will endure fatigues 
impossible to individuals, will do deeds utterly ab- 
horrent under usual conditions to most of those who 
commit them. Nothing is too extravagant for a 
crowd to accept as fact, no revulsion of feeling un- 
der a new impulse is too immense for it to experi- 
ence, no refinement of cruelty or, on the other 



Destruction of the Ursuline Convent IIQ 

hand, no height of heroism is too tremendous for 
such a crowd to indulge in. But in none of these 
things, good or bad, does it exhibit reason. This 
was well exemplified in the notorious Charlestown 
mob of 1834. 

In that year Boston differed almost more from the 
Boston of to-day than it did from that of 1634. It 
was still, to all intents and purposes, a village, cut 
off from the rest of the world by seas, isolated 
from its sister cities by feebleness of transporta- 
tion. Its population was still practically homogene- 
ous and of the Puritan type. It still viewed Popery 
with the hatred of the days of the Gunpowder Plot, 
still looked upon foreigners with eyes not very dif- 
ferent from those with which the Chinese, not with- 
out reason, regard the "foreign devil" to-day. 

The population of the entire United States was 
only about fourteen millions, that of Boston scarcely 
forty thousand ; and what is now the Charlestown 
District was then an independent town. But the 
development of railroads, coupled with political 
and social distresses in Ireland, had brought new 
problems into the lives of this chosen people of 
Puritan Yankees. The demand for laborers had 
attracted what seemed in those days a vast number 
of foreigners, mainly Irish, and their coming had 
created the necessity for the Roman Catholic re- 
ligion, a demand which the zealous leaders of that 
faith are never slow in meeting. Thousands of 
Catholics had, within a few years, come to the city, 
and they were ministered to by two churches: the 
Cathedral of the Holy Cross, on Franklin Street, 



I20 New England Conscience 

and a smaller church in Charlestown. To the less 
intelligent portion of this' homogeneous little city, 
here were two portentous things: imported labor, 
and the vanguard of the Pope of Rome. More 
significant, the two new things seemed to have 
close relation. 

Meanwhile, the Catholic Order of St. Ursula, a 
sisterhood vowed to the giving of religious and 
secular instruction, had established, in 1820, a con- 
vent in a small building next to the Cathedral ; and 
so well did these nuns prosper that in 1826 they re- 
moved to a larger building at the foot of Mt. Bene- 
dict (then at the extreme limit of Charlestown, 
now a part of Somerville) and began the erection of 
a large convent on the top of the hill itself, in the 
midst of an estate of twelve acres. A minor cause 
of offence was that they were enabled to do this 
largely through the generosity of a converted Prot- 
estant, a Mr. Thayer. In 1828 the new building 
was occupied, and a conspicuous and imposing one 
it must have been. The main house was fully 
eighty feet long, three stories high, with a pitched 
roof, a large dormer, and a cupola; and on either 
side it had wings, a story less in height, extended 
back to enclose a paved courtyard. The whole was 
of brick and, with its grounds elaborately terraced, 
with gardens and bowers and greenhouses, with a 
farmhouse, barn and other out-buildings, and with a 
view embracing on one side the whole Boston basin 
with its flanking hills, and on the other the harbor 
and the sea, the institution must have indeed been, 
as its circular asserted, "an extensive establishment 



Destruction of the Ursuline Convent I2I 



. , . commanding one of the most beautiful 
prospects in the United States." 

The course of study which the Convent offered 
was no less elaborate than the building. "All the 
attainments" were to be got there — to quote again 
from the circular — "which may be found necessary, 
useful and ornamental in society." The young ladies 
in the Junior Department (the juniors and seniors 
being inexorably kept apart) had to content them- 
selves with the common branches and plain and 
fancy needlework ; but no sooner did they enter the 
Senior Department than they had spread before 
their minds, according to the prospectus, "Plain and 
ornamental writing; Composition, both in prose and 
poetry; ancient, modern and natural History; 
Chronology ; Mythology ; and the use of the Globes ; 
Astronomy; Rhetoric; Logic; Natural and Moral 
Philosophy; Chemistry, Arithmetic; Geometry; 
and Botany; every kind of useful and ornamental 
Needlework; Japanning; Drawing in all its varie- 
ties ; Painting on Velvet, Satin and Wood ; and 
the beautiful style of Mezzotinto and Poonah Paint- 
ing." Music with diflFerent instruments and danc- 
ing were also taught, the latter by the original 
Papanti; and this feast of arts and sciences was 
capped, in the last quarter, and at an added charge 
of t\venty dollars, with cookery. 

We may smile at this formidable list and wonder 
how five women could impart so much in so short a 
space of time ; but it was the English fashion of that 
day, and many a day after, for the accomplished 
young lady to do all things — most of them very 



122 New England Conscience 

badly; and there seems every reason to believe that 
the overworked Sisters of St. Ursula, mainly Irish 
ladies, were accomplished and well taught. In this 
school on Mt. Benedict was offered, therefore, a 
training very rare in the New England of that time. 
Absolute regularity of hours was enforced by the 
Convent bell, from the early rising at half past five 
to the early retiring at half past seven. The day 
was well filled with tasks — not the long list of 
the prospectus, but the common branches, together 
with drawing, writing, lettering, sewing, embroid- 
ery, music and other accomplishments thought es- 
sential to the well bred girl of eighty years ago. 
The school rooms were small, with square boxes 
placed regularly around them, and with one or 
more tables in the centre. On the boxes the pupils 
sat, their backs, in the good old fashion, unsupport- 
ed ; and in the boxes were kept their books. On 
fine afternoons the girls did much of their work- 
ing, and some playing, out of doors, a nun always 
with them, not to repress them, but, on the con- 
trary, to take a lively and childlike interest in their 
most trivial doings. The meals, eaten in silence, 
were plain but wholesome: always an abundance 
of good bread, sometimes with butter, sometimes 
with sauce, never with both ; plenty of fresh milk ; 
tea or coffee made innocuously weak; meat once a 
day, excepting, of course, on Fridays; vegetables 
from the Convent farm ; and occasionally a plain 
pudding. The uniform of the girls was a gray 
bombazet with caps of blue, save on Sunday, when 
white was permitted, and on certain great days, 



Destruction of the Ursuline Convent 123 

when a pink sash might decorate the white. 

The supreme event of the school j'ear was Cor- 
onation Day. Then parents and friends for the 
only time were admitted to the schoolrooms, the 
prizes of the year awarded, a gold and silver medal 
given, and the two best girls of the year crowned 
with artificial wreaths (white for the senior and 
pink for the junior) and seated upon thrones to the 
sound of a coronation song. One stanza of this 
will perhaps suffice: 

"Proceed, fair Queens, to your fond homes; 
Give joy unto that sacred dome; 
Return to be a Father's pride, 
The stay of a fond Mother's side. 
Long may your A\elcom(:'s echo sound, 
And grateful words be heard around. 
Long may your virtues breathe on earth, 
Long breathe the odour of your worth." 

Then followed the one feast of the year, at which 
the nuns vied with one another in producing elabo- 
rately indigestible dishes, whose secrets they had 
learned in the French convents of their younger 
days. 

The pupils of this Ursuline house on Mt. Bene- 
dict, averaging about seventy in number, were main- 
ly the daughters of wealthy Protestants. Most of 
the girls bore names distinguished in Boston and its 
vicinity: but a few — and these were generally the 
only Catholics — came from regions so widely sepa- 
rate as Canada and the West Indies. Beyond at- 
tendance upon morning prayers, and mass on Sun- 



124 New England Conscience 



days, the Protestants were required to take part 
in no religious exercises, nor was the slightest at- 
tempt made to convert any to the Romanist faith. 
I'his point was so hotly disputed at the time, and 
afterw^ards, that it is most valuable to have direct 
testimony from Protestant ladies who were pupils 
at the Convent, declaring that, while good morals 
were constantly instilled by the sisters, the subject 
of religion was never broached by them. The 
Protestant pupils were not simply permitted, they 
were required, to take their own Bibles to the church 
services, and were urged to read from them during 
the saying of the mass. One of these ladies states, 
further, that never were more perfect gentlewomen 
than the sisters, and that not once in her long resi- 
dence did she see them out of temper or wanting in 
sweet patience. Notwithstanding — or perhaps be- 
cause of — this serenity of disposition and the ab- 
sence of severe punishments, the discipline among 
the pupils was extraordinarily good. Their great- 
est transgression, which brought its own swift pun- 
ishment, was the stealing and eating of raw tur- 
nips from the Convent garden. 

The Mother Superior, a French-Irish woman, did 
no teaching, her time being more than occupied with 
a general oversight of the establishment. She was 
little seen, therefore, by the pupils, unless they were 
sent to her for admonition. Mild as her punish- 
ments were, her extraordinary dignity of manner 
seems to have made an astonishing impression, so 
that the smile or frown of an Eastern potentate 
could not have been more momentous. This regal 



Destruction of the Ursultne Convent 125 



attitude and habit of mind, coupled with an ignor- 
ance of the world in general and of the Yankee 
world in particular, made that secular intercourse 
which, as Superior, it was her duty to carry on, not 
entirely successful. Mother St. George (that be- 
ing her religious name) lacked tact; she despised 
her neighbors, the brick-making canaille, mostly 
worthy men from New Hampshire, who hated Pop- 
cry and all its works; and she had little patience, 
although she paid them promptly, with the heretic 
trades-people and town officials of Charlestown. 

The winter of 1833-34 was one of extraordinary 
religious revival in New England. The active and 
fervent Protestant preachers of Boston and its vicin- 
ity seized the fruitful occasion to denounce Pop- 
ery. Dr. Lyman Beecher, especially, in a series of 
lectures, seems to have hurled all the thunderbolts 
of his eloquence against the Catholic Church so 
rapidly taking root in Protestant America. These 
zealous pastors can scarcely have refrained from 
pointing their words by directing a warning finger 
towards this prosperous house set conspicuously on 
a hill and holding within its walls the daughters 
of so many Protestants. At the same time, the 
laborers and mechanics were not slow to denounce 
the Irish Papists, seeking and securing the work 
that belonged of right to the natives, and to imagine 
all manner of Jesuitical plots in this rapidly increas- 
ing influx of foreign Catholics. Moreover, the pu- 
pils of the Convent themselves, very properly forbid- 
den to enter that part of the house reserved to the 
use of the nuns, imagined, with schoolgirl readiness, 



126 New England Conscience 

many mysteries, which, told outside the school, grew 
with repetition into startling tales. So from all 
sides the law of the crowd was slowly working, and 
the minds of the people were being brought into a 
widespread state of suspicion, ready for hypnotic 
leading to almost any lengths. 

The first incident to attract general attention 
was the alleged escape of Rebecca Theresa Reed. She 
was an ignorant but imaginative young person, whom 
much reading of romances had made yearn for the 
life of a nun. Taken into Mt. Benedict as a ser- 
vant, she was soon disenchanted, and ran away. 
This she did by breaking through lattices and climb- 
ing a high fence, although the carriage gate of the 
Convent grounds stood wide open. The Mother 
Superior happened to witness this melodramatic 
flight, and called several of the sisters and pupils 
to the window "to see Miss Reed run away." This 
girl's romantic imagination and the credulity of cer- 
tain of her friends created marvelous revelations of 
ill-treatment and wrongdoing at the Convent, reve- 
lations which passed from ear to ear, ever amplified 
as they traveled, and which, after the destruction of 
the Convent, were published under the title, "Six 
Months in a Convent," producing much excite- 
ment and controversy. In this book — which was 
written for her — Miss Reed made charges of for- 
cible proselyting and of an intended abduction of 
herself to St. Louis ; but these charges were woven 
into such a tissue of false and improbable state- 
ments, that it is charitable to suppose her to have 
been a neurotic who, by her imaginings and repeti- 



Destruction of the Ursuline Convent 127 



tion of them to others, brought herself into a state 
of actual belief. Wliile it is impossible flatly to 
confute her statements, there is the strongest internal 
evidence against them, the simple fact that she 
alone saw and experienced these dreadful things 
being enough to disprove them in a court of law. 
However, her stories made a vast impression, espe- 
cially as they were met, on the part of the Mother 
Superior, with the contemptuous and violent 
language which she almost habitually used towards 
too zealous Protestants. 

A trivial incident — the ordering ofif the Convent 
grounds by the porter, the popular story asserting 
with violence and the setting on of the Convent dog, 
of some ladies who had attempted to cross them, 
and the subsequent drubbing of the porter by a 
brick-maker, Buzzell, afterwards one of the lead- 
ers of the riot — did not tend to improve the strained 
relations between the Superior and her neighbors ; 
and on July 28 occurred a sensational affair which 
seemed to confirm the stories of the eloped Miss 
Reed and to prove this imposing building on Mt. 
Benedict a veritable Bastille. 

A large share of the labor of preparing for the 
Coronation Day of 1834 had fallen upon the Mother 
Assistant, Sister Mary John, the teacher of music. 
It is stated that for a long period she had to give 
no less than fourteen lessons of at least forty-five 
minutes each a day. This tax upon her nerves result- 
ed, naturally, in brain fever. In delirium she escaped 
from the Convent, sought refuge with its nearest 
neighbor, a Mr. Cutter, and was by him sent to 



128 New England Conscience 



what was then West Cambridge, to the house of 
Mr. Cotting, two of whose daughters had been 
pupils at the nunnery. 

A night's rest under the tender care of the Cot- 
tings restored Miss Harrison (for such was her 
worldly name), and on the next day, at her own 
earnest wish, she was taken back to the Convent. 
But the ravings of this nun while in delirium, her 
appeals for aid, and the not unnatural perturbation 
of the Mother Superior and the Bishop over her 
flight, gave rise to most dreadful rumors. Here, 
then, was the striking incident needful to compel 
the attention of the community and to carry out 
the law of crowds. At once this poor sister v\as 
dubbed the "Mysterious Lady," and the wildest 
stories of her ill-treatment and sufferings found im- 
mediate and unqualified belief. In the popular 
mind the building on Mt. Benedict became a very 
labyrinth of dungeons, crowded with instruments of 
torture, and every iniquity associated with the most 
corrupt periods of the church was fastened upon 
this quiet institution. 

Within ten days after the return of Sister Mary 
John to the Convent, rumors of her imprisonment, 
of her secret removal to more horrid dungeons, 
even of her torturing and murder by being buried 
alive, had attained extravagant proportions. The 
Boston daily papers added fuel to the flame by pub- 
lishing these rumors, without comment, but with- 
out the slightest investigation as to their probability. 

To quiet the public agitation, Mr. Cutter, in 
whose house Sister Mary John in her delirium had 




A oi 



o ,- 



3u 



u 



Destruction of the Ursuline Convent 129 



first taken refuge, called at the Convent on Satur- 
day, August 9, saw the now convalescent nun, and 
was by her informed, with lamentations over the 
trouble into which she had brought the sisterhood, 
that she was entirely at liberty to leave the Convent 
at any time, but that she had not the slightest wish 
to do so. This gentleman agreed, therefore, to 
publish over his signature the true facts regarding 
this so-called "Mysterious Lady" in the Boston 
papers of Monday morning. Unfortunately, in 
those sleepy days of journalism, his statement did 
not appear till Tuesday. 

Meanwhile the selectmen of Charlestown, be- 
stirring themselves, had arranged thoroughly to 
inspect the Convent ; and on the afternoon of Mon- 
day, the eleventh, they visited the building. If we 
are to trust the account of Mrs. Whitney, in her 
book, "The Burning of the Convent," these officials 
were met with upbraiding from the Superior and 
with jeers from the pupils; but according to their 
own published statement, which did not, of course, 
appear until Tuesday, the twelfth, "they were con- 
ducted by the lady in question" (Sister Mary John) 
"throughout the premises, and into every apartment 
of the place, the whole of which is in good order, 
and nothing appearing to them to be in the least 
objectionable; and they have the satisfaction to 
assure the public that there exists no cause of com- 
plaint on the part of said female, as she expresses 
herself to be entirely satisfied with her present situa- 
tion, it being that of her own choice, and that she 
has no desire or wish to alter it." 



:30 New England Conscience 

Whatever fault one may find with the English of 
this statement, it was explicit; but it came too 
late, — would have been too late even had it ap- 
peared on the morning of the fatal day. The law 
of the mob had done its work, reason had departed 
from the hypnotized mind of the community, and 
imagination, running riot, had built up a fabric 
more lasting than was to be the "beautiful edifice" 
upon Mt. Benedict. 

For, during those early August days, the "Boston 
Truckmen" and other organized bodies had been 
holding secret meetings. From them, or from other 
sources, had come inflammatory circulars denounc- 
ing Catholicism in general and the nunnery in 
particular. Destruction of the Convent building 
was openly threatened ; and rumors of a most 
alarming nature flew about the city. A procession 
of parents and friends, therefore, visited the Superior 
all day on Monday. Not one of them, however, 
thought it necessary to remove the pupils, all agree- 
ing that a mob in the vicinity of staid old Boston 
in the nineteenth century was something not to be 
thought of. These visits, the continual requests 
for a sight of Sister Mary John, the inspection by 
the selectmen, seem to have electrified the atmos- 
phere of the vsleepy Convent with a new and pleas- 
urable excitement rather than with fear. So un- 
wonted was the bustle, that soon after their early 
going to bed the pupils in their several dormitories 
were fast asleep. 

Towards ten o'clock this sleep was broken by 
sudden and fearful howls. The much talked of 



Destruction of the Vrsuline Convent 13 1 



mob had really come, having swept in comparative 
silence out from Boston over the Charlestown 
bridge. It was as yet small in size and whoUv 
irresolute; but, wakened by its onward rush and 
shouting, the pupils, already in a state of tension, 
were at once thrown into a fever of excitement, 
most of them screaming, not a few falling in 
hysterics and some in a dead faint. The poor nuns 
— always excepting the Mother Superior, who never 
faltered or flinched throughout that fearful night — 
were in little better case than the children, one of 
them going ofif into convulsive fits, Sister Mary 
John, the innocent immediate cause of the disaster, 
again losing her shaken wits, and a novice, far ad- 
vanced in consumption and who died within a few 
days from shock, remaining all night as one already 
dead. 

For two hours the mob did little except to hurl 
blasphemous and indecent threats against the nun- 
nery, defying the Superior to come out. and calling 
upon her to show them the "Mysterious Lady" 
imprisoned in the dungeons of the Convent. Little 
of this, fortunately, reached the ears of the chil- 
dren, for the dormitories were at the back of the 
building; but the nuns, cowering in the unlighted 
front rooms, heard it all ; and the Mother Superior, 
chafing more and more under the horrible insults, 
could at last be no longer restrained. Breaking 
away from the weeninq; sisters, she flung wide the 
middle doo"- — th«t joor which only she and the 
Bishop had a riglit to use — and faced the mob. 
Had she understood the fickleness of crowds, had 



132 New England Conscience 



she known the power that a woman of her courage 
has, had she appreciated that sight and sound of 
poor Mary John, even in her distraught condition, 
would have set at rest the rumors at least of murder, 
she might at that eleventh hour have saved her 
community. But she met that cursing mob with a 
violence only less than their own, calling them 
vagabonds, drunkards, canaille, exciting their worst 
suspicions by positively refusing to produce the sis- 
ter, and threatening them, in language she had 
already used to Mr. Cutter, that "if they did not 
immediately disperse, Bishop Fen wick had ten thou- 
sand Irishmen at his back, who would sweep them 
all into the sea." No combination of words could 
have been more ill-timed. This threat was im- 
mediately answered by two pistol shots, which going 
wide of their mark, resulted both in a temporary 
sobering of the rnob and in a forced retreat of the 
Superior, dragged back into the house by her terrifi- 
ed subordinates. 

For some time yet the mob hesitated, prowling 
about, muttering and cursing; then, of a sudden it 
swept oflF down the hill, and the mercurial children 
became frantic with the joy of relief, — but only for 
a short time. Soon they hear a tearing and crack- 
ing, as the crowd pull down the Convent fences; 
soon they see first a flickering and then a flaming, 
as huge bonfires, richly fed with tar barrels, shoot 
up, revealing the rioters, some of them fantastically 
disguised, dancing like madmen in rings about the 
flames. 

Whether or not preconcerted, these bonfires set 



Destruction of the Ursuline Convent 133 

on that lofty hill attract within a short time a mul- 
titude of people. They attract, too, the primitive 
fire engine of Charlestown and the newly-created 
fire department of Boston. The former firemen, af- 
ter some parley with the rioters, go, like the king of 
France, down the hill again; the latter remain (and 
probably their contention that they took no part in 
the assault of the Convent was justified), but do 
nothing to save the threatened property, being com- 
pletely paralyzed by the mob spirit. At that time, 
and even much later, a few resolute men, all testi- 
mony goes to show, could easily have dispersed the 
rioters; but, as we have seen, the firemen did noth- 
ing; one selectman raised a feeble voice, but hav- 
ing weak eyes, too weak to recognize any of the 
rioters, soon went home and to bed ; and a great 
crowd of ordinarily respectable citizens, who, there 
is no doubt, were spectators of the scene, contented 
themselves with watching from afar, the word 
"mob" and the hypnotism of the situation wholly 
quenching their collective courage. 

Probably at this point a powerful sustainer of 
mobs in the shape of a barrel of rum was brought 
and distributed. Made brave by this, the body of 
one or two hundred men, with brands from the fires, 
again surged up the hill like savages. Armed with 
bricks and stones, deaf to all thought of reason, 
possessed by an animal hunger for destruction, they 
began, shortly after midnight, this most outrageous 
assault upon a house occupied solely by ten feeble 
women and fifty terror-stricken children. Never, 
certainly in the history of New England, has there 



134 New England Conscience 



been a more cowardly performance. Bad as some 
others of our mobs have been, their fury was at least 
directed against men, possessing some power of re- 
sistance and retaliation. 

The character of the band which made this 
courageous charge is quite well sampled, so to speak, 
by the thirteen men who by the efforts of the "Fa- 
neuil Hall committee" subsequently were arrested 
and put on trial. The mob seems to have been 
made up of Boston laborers and mechanics, who, 
intending merely to intimidate the Irish by a dem- 
onstration against this Catholic house, were led by 
the crowd-fever into unexpected violence; of brick 
yard employees who had personal grudges against 
the Convent and its Superior; of ignorant and 
prurient-minded men whose imaginations had been 
inflamed by foulest stories of monastic corruption; 
of friends of Theresa Reed, who seems to have had 
power to rouse a bitter championship ; of bigots who 
thought to do religion a service by destroying one 
of its homes; of Irish Protestants, who are prover- 
bially unfriendly to their Catholic brethren ; of 
petty criminals and law-breakers, always present 
where there is prospect of disorder; and, finally, of 
thoughtless boys, who were there for fun. But, by 
the mob-spirit, all these men and boys were brought 
down to one common level of brute destructiveness. 

The first impulse of the Superior when she saw 
these demons coming, as she no doubt believed, to 
kill her, was to invoke the only shadow of law she 
had within her reach. With pitiable faith in the 
power of magistracy, she thrust out from an upper 



Destruction of the Vrsuline Convent 135 

window the daughter of a Cambridge judge, bid- 
ding her warn the mob — which, however, was quite 
heedless of her — that her father would put them all 
in prison. This poor weapon failing of effect, the 
Superior, marshalling the children in their custom- 
ary two-by-two, started toward the barred front 
door, thinking, perhaps, that a sight of this terror- 
stricken flock might move the mob to pity. But 
this modern martyrdom of St. Ursula was not to 
be. Just as Mother St. George reached the middle 
landing there came a tremendous shower of stones, 
breaking all the windows of the lower story and 
giving access to the Superior's office. Fortunately 
for her, this room contained much of value, includ- 
ing a large sum of money; and while the mob stop- 
ped to pillage, she had time to take her flock of 
nuns and children down a back stairway and out 
into the paved court, leading them thence into the 
Convent garden. This garden, luckily, was cut of? 
from the front of the building by high fences. It 
was, therefore, quite deserted, and the poor fugi- 
tives could patter unmolested, and in trembling si- 
lence, to the vicinity of the Convent tomb, a large 
brick structure which the zeal of the searching se- 
lectmen had caused to be opened, and in which, 
doubtless, the Superior intended to stand at bay. 

What an experience for those terrified women and 
children, crouching in that silent garden on that 
hot August night! On the one side, the half-opened 
tomb, more terrible to most of them than the riot- 
ers themselves; on fhe other the gloomy building, 
lighted at first dimly and fitfully, as a few of the 



136 New England Conscience 

rioters with lanterns and firebrands sought plunder 
through the upper rooms, and then more brightly, 
as the mass of the mob, having searched the cellars 
in vain for dungeons and instruments of torture, 
mounted from floor to floor, smashing the furni- 
ture, tearing down the curtains, shivering the mir- 
rors, throwing the combustibles into great heaps, 
and flinging the solider articles, even pianos and 
harps, out through the crashing windows; and 
over all the late-rising moon flung weird tree- 
shadows, while the blazing tar barrtU made of the 
hilltop a huge beacon, reflected and multiplied a 
hundred times in a wide circle of glowing brick- 
kilns. 

So long as plunder and the work of destruction 
should keep the mob in the building, its fugitive 
occupants were safe; but the rioters still howled 
for the Superior, still searched fitfully for the body 
of the "Mysterious Lady," and must soon look 
systematically for both. At this critical time — for 
even had the nuns not been paralyzed with terror, 
it would have been impossible for them to get the 
fifty or sixty children over the high board fence 
which, shutting the world out, shut also the fugi- 
tives in — Mr. Cutter, the neighbor who had already 
figured so prominently, came again to the rescue. 
He and the men with him broke through the fence, 
and, partly through this opening and partly by lift- 
ing them over the high palings, got all the nuns and 
such of the pupils as had not escaped in other direc- 
tions out of the garden and down the hill to the 
Cutter house. Here the testimony is very conflict- 



Destruction of the Ursuline Convent 137 

ing. It is asserted, on the one hand, that the fugi- 
tives remained in this house until it seemed impera- 
tive for them to seek a more distant shelter; on the 
other, that the Superior refused to enter Mr. Cut- 
ter's house at all, and started across the mile of 
dreary clay flats towards Winter Hill, dragging 
her tired charges after her. Whatever the facts as 
to his residence, it is certain that Mr. Cutter in- 
sisted upon going with them thence to find some 
safe asylum. So this strange procession struck across 
the fields among the brick yards. Sister Mary John 
striding ahead, muttering and gesticulating; the 
stronger nuns half dragging, half carrying, the dy- 
ing novice ; the Superior, stout and scant of breath, 
always commanding a slower pace; and the weeping, 
weary children, in every state of undress, some with 
little more than their nightgowns, others with their 
entire w^ardrobe upon their backs, huddling behind ; 
the whole scene illuminated by the huge torch of the 
Convent building, now a mass of flames. 

How Mr. Cutter went from door to door of his 
friends, knocking in vain at the seemingly empty 
houses; how the good Mr. and Mrs. Adams, with 
hospitality, but with deadly fear for their own 
lives, took them all in; how the former, with aston- 
ishing presence of mind and histrionic ability, threw 
the rioters — who soon followed, hounding the 
Superior — oflF the scent by feigning to have just 
awakened ; and how, as daylight came, the friends 
of the fugitives, guided by Mr. Cutter, came to the 
rescue of the nuns and children, is too long a story. 

What could have been the journalistic enterprise 



138 New England Conscience 



of that day, which produced nothing more, the next 
morning, than a few lines of bald statement about 
the burning of the Convent? But the news travel- 
ed faster than the newspapers ; and before the day 
was over, Faneuil Hall, that safety valve of Boston, 
had seen a monster mass meeting, at which dis- 
tinguished men, including the eloquent Harrison 
Gray Otis, spoke in no measured terms, and a 
notable committee, headed by Mayor Lyman, was 
appointed to bring the ringleaders of the mob to 
justice. Mass meetings were held also in Cam- 
bridge, Charlestovvn, and other towns; the militia 
was called out to guard Catholic property; and 
bodies of citizens, under arms, patrolled the streets 
for a week, ready to prevent new outrages. For it 
had been shown that even sober Boston could have 
a mob ; and there was no limit to the fevered con- 
juring of imaginary further mobs. Rumors of 
organized bodies of Irishmen coming from all over 
the state to burn and slaughter were rife ; demon- 
strations and threats, counter demonstrations and 
counter threats, were hurled in newspapers, by 
hand-bills, and by incipient mobs, until Boston and 
its vicinity was in a whirlwind of excitement. The 
Roman Catholic Bishop Fenwick and the other 
priests behaved with wisdom and moderation. They 
exhorted their people in most eloquent terms to 
take no revenge, but to await without misgiving the 
course of aroused public opinion and the law. 

The Faneuil Hall committee, as has been said, se- 
cured the arrest of thirteen rioters; and a mass of 
testimony, bolstered by much legal eloquence, was 



Destruction of the Ursuline Convent 139 

poured forth at the several trials. But, while the 
guilt of most of the defendants was plain, the proof 
against them was conflicting and impeachable, the 
atmosphere of the court rooms was blue with bigotry 
and hate, the tales and rumors which had fomented 
the mob still had living force. The verdict, there- 
fore, was "not guilty" in every case save one — and 
he probably the least criminal — young Marcy, a boy 
of s<"\enteen, who had done nothing more heinous 
than to sell the Bishop's books that night at mock 
auction before tossing them into the flames. At 
the petition of thousands of Catholics, he was in a 
few months pardoned. So ended the famous Con- 
vent mob. 

Not really ended ; for many a legislature was 
memorialized to make good the money loss, placed 
at not less than fifty thousand dollars, suffered by 
the Bishop and the Convent's pupils. But while, in 
all cases, the committees of the General Court re- 
ported that this reparation should be made, the ap- 
propriation of the money has never yet been voted ; 
and for more than forty years the gaunt ruin of the 
Convent stood on its conspicuous height, a monu- 
ment, left of intention by its owners, to the injus- 
tice of free Massachusetts. 

The Convent site and neighborhood were long 
ago transferred from Charlestown to the town of 
Somerville. Today Mt. Benedict has been cut away 
to fill up the marshes along the Boston and Maine 
Railroad; and far below the quiet garden of the 
Ursulines will run streets of houses, obliterating the 
last vestiges of this dramatic event. 



140 New England Conscience 



VII 

Theodore Parker 

AT the head of Lexington Green stands 
a statue of a fine young farmer, his 
musket ready, his whole form alert for 
action. It is called Capt. John Parker, 
but it is not he; for that modest leader 
of the Minute Men died in September, 1775, leav- 
ing no pictured or sculptured trace behind. The 
figure on Lexington Green is better than a mere 
portrait. It is an idealization of the Parker spirit, 
— the spirit of protest against wrong, the spirit of 
popular championship, the spirit of democracy. 

It was an absurd spectacle, — that of seventy un- 
disciplined farmers standing in opposition to eight 
hundred of the King's best men. Yet in its mean- 
ing and results that fight at Lexington was one 
of the great battles of the world. Even Napoleon 
with all his legions changed the course of history 
scarcely more than did Capt. John Parker and his 
handful of uncouth men. 

He and his followers were untrained in mili- 
tarism, but they were not unschooled. They and 
their forebears had been disciplined by frontier life 
and warfare and had been educated in that finest 
academy of citizenship — the New England Town 
Meeting. In that school they had learned to think 
their own thoughts, to speak their own minds and 
to have due regard for the rights of everyone. To 




Tiiiioi^oRH 1'.\rki:r 



Theodore Parker 141 



them, therefore, the pretensions of the ill-advised 
King George were impossible; and, since they in- 
volved things dearer even than life, must be op- 
posed, if need be, with life itself. The seven men 
who fell in the dawning of April 19th, the men 
from Woburn and from many other towns who 
died later in that day, planted with their very bodies 
the seeds of true democracy. Less than a hundred 
years later there was another costly planting; and to 
the end of time, there must be single martyrs and 
armies of martyrs for human liberty. High in that 
noble and blessed company stands Theodore Parker. 

Poorly and obscurely born, therefore, as he was, 
Theodore, as the grandson of Capt. John Parker, 
had a unique inheritance. Martyrship and leader- 
ship were in his blood, and noble accounting did 
he render of the splendid heritage. Like Lincoln, 
he not only knew the common people, he believed in 
them, confident that through their solid common 
sense right and truth are certain to prevail. There 
is no more significant phrase in American literature 
than this sentence of Parker's: "The people ar^t 
always true to a good man who truly trusts them." 
It is as a leader of the people against injustice, 
against superstition, against ignorance, against the 
crushing and deadening weight of outworn conven- 
tions, that Parker should be judged; and it was as 
such a leader that his great work for the world was 
done. 

Moreover, as befits a genuine democrat, Theodore 
Parker was intensely practical. Profoundly re- 
ligious, he never was tempted into mysticism; lov- 



142 New England Conscience 

ing to preach, he never became lost in the forest 
of his own words; an ardent reformer, he yet never 
overlooked the long, steep, weary road which lies 
betv\een the conception and the realization of re- 
form. Furthermore, he possessed what so many 
leaders and reformers lack. — that saving sense of 
humor, which shows a man the world-wide differ- 
ence between the fruitful idea and the merely gro- 
tesque idea in his striving to improve the world. 

A transcendentalist, he yet kept his feet always 
on the solid earth of human experience; a near 
neighbor, while pastor of the West Roxbury Church, 
of Hrook Farm, he was never deceived as to the 
inevitable end of that Utopia; a strong advocate 
of temperance, he did not hesitate to denounce the 
folly of attempting to enforce total abstinence by 
law ; welcomed in the best intellectual society of 
America and Europe, he never separated himself 
from, or lost faith in, the power and the instinctive 
grip upon fundamental truth of the slower minds 
of the great common people. 

It was snecringly said that his Music Hall audi- 
ences were made up not of the "best" persons, but of 
butchers, bakers, and small tradesmen. But it was 
in just that type of audience that Parker rejoiced, 
for in influencing them, as he so profoundly did, he 
knew that he was exerting a power that would tell. 
It was these men and women, he appreciated, who 
would make the laws, who would reform methods of 
philanthropy, who would dictate the education of the 
next generation, who would liberalize the churches, 
and who would, if necessary, fight that fight for the 



Theodore Parker 143 



slaves which he did not live to see, but which he 
foresaw must come. 

In no direction did the practical qualitj' of his 
mind appear more plainly than in his dealings with 
the complex problems of society. He was impatient 
of talk and was always eager, not only to work him- 
self, but to get others busy. "I should like," he 
writes, "to preach a sermon on John Augustus, one 
of the most extraordinary men I ever knew ; he cre- 
ated a new department of humanity and loved the 
unlovely." , . . "Ministers preach benevolence 
and beneficence ; he went and did it. How many 
drunkards did he save from the pit of ruin ! How 
many thieves and robbers and other infamous per- 
sons did he help out of their wickedness!" John 
Augustus, whom he thus eulogizes, was a shoemaker 
in Lexington, who for many years did all these 
things in the most unostentatious way, and who was 
among the first, moreover, to save youth by lying 
in wait for discharged boy prisoners and finding them 
honest work to do. It was that kind of personal, 
practical philanthropy which appealed to Mr. Park- 
er, and he was never so happy as when he had or- 
ganized, within his parish or without, some group 
of men and women for the actual, day-by-day work 
of social rescue and reform. 

"Religion," Parker said, "rises early every morn- 
ing and works all day." That was the type of his 
religion, his philanthropy, his labors for social better- 
ment; and all three of these activities were Inter- 
mingled In every thought and endeavor of his life. 
It is difficult, therefore, to disentangle one of his 



144 New England Conscience 



interests from another, and to say: "Here he was a 
preacher, here an anti-slavery worker, here a social 
reformer." He was religious through and through, 
so that every act was to him an office of religion; 
while every religious aspiration, he believed, should 
take shape in deeds. He was so filled with this 
moral zeal that there was no work for the good of 
the community or of mankind in general in which 
he did not take a lively interest and generally a 
leading part. As his biographer, John Weiss, truly 
says, the period before the Civil War was one of 
intense moral awakening, making men to be extra- 
ordinarily alive, not simply to the problems of sla- 
very, but to those of prison-reform, temperance, 
peace, Sunday observance, and to the general res- 
cue, as Parker phrases it, of the "perishing classes." 
All these moral problems were discussed, moreover, 
not simply in pulpits, but on lyceum platforms, and 
with a fervor on the part of speakers and a breath- 
less attention on the part of audiences today diflficult 
to understand. It was true missionary zeal that led 
the lecturers of ante-bellum days to undergo such 
hardships as they did for mere pittances of pay. 
Slow and infrequent trains, without sleeping cars, 
endless waits at dreary junctions, nights of tor- 
ment in unspeakable country hotels, long drives 
through cold winter evenings, ill-ventilated halls, 
and other almost incredible discomforts were the 
portion of every lyceum speaker, and to a semi-in- 
valid like Theodore Parker these hardships must 
have been almost unbearable. Yet he did his full 
share of lecturing, in addition to the heavy duties 



Theodore Parker 1 45 

of preaching, of pastoral work and of writing, until 
his physicians actually forced him to flee to warmer 
climates in a vain effort to escape impending death. 
And whether working beyond his strength, or wheth- 
er chafing in enforced idleness, he never complained, 
never lost his wonderful sweetness and sunniness of 
soul. He laments, it is true, the fact that he should 
have been able to do so little! — he who performed, in 
his fifty years of life, the work of six ordinary men ; 
and after twelve years of preaching he regrets that 
the crisis of slaven,' should have forced him to turn 
aside from his plan to devote his life to the "perish- 
ing classes." All that he did do, moreover, he re- 
garded merely as the payment of a just debt to 
society. He who had been obliged to educate him- 
self in the intervals of heavy work upon a farm ; he 
who had been so poor that he could not take the 
degree at Harvard, though he passed all its exami- 
nations ; he who was reviled as a heretic and shun- 
ned as a friend of the despised "Nigger;" he whose 
life was frequently threatened and was always in 
danger; he who found himself cut off in the zenith 
of life by a disease directly brought on by his la- 
bors for his fellowmen ; he, at the beginning of his 
first real vacation, writes as follows: — 

"I am now to spend a year in foreign travel. In 
this year I shall earn nothing; neither my food, nor 
my clothes, nor even the paper I write on. Of 
course I shall increase my debt to the world by 
every potato I eat, and each mile I travel. How 
shall I repay the debt? Only by extraordinary 
efforts after I return. I hope to continue my 



146 New England Conscience 

present plans in this way: 

"i. To work in behalf of temperance, education, 
a change in the social fabric, so that the weak 
shall not be slaves of the strong. 

"2. To show that religion belongs to man's na- 
ture, that it demands piety, morality and theology. 

"3. To write an introduction to the New Testa- 
ment. 

"4. To write a historical development of religion 
in the history of man. 

"5. Such other works as may become necessary. 

"In this way I hope to work out my debt." 

We know how he paid his debt in the coin of anti- 
slavery service, how he minted his brain into the 
gold of scholarly thought and \\ riting. How did 
he discharge that alleged obligation under the head 
which he first enumerates, — that of working "in 
behalf of temperance, education and a change in 
the social fabric?" In these and in many other 
social directions he was a glowing and stimulating 
force; and what he did was, as I have already said, 
intensely practical. He labored actively for tem- 
perance in flaming words full of graphic appeal ; 
but it was a practical, not a fanatical, temperance 
that he zealously preached. Ke organized an active 
society for the actual street rescue of friendless, 
tempted girls. He studied education at first hand 
by long and faithful service on school committees, 
and he contributed many an important thought and 
plan to that slowly growing science. He formulat- 
ed methods of public and private charity that an- 
ticipated the best ideas of to-day. And above all, 



Theodore Parker 147 



he forwarded true democracy, not by pulling the 
social and intellectual leaders down, but by raising 
the great common people up. "The people are 
always true to a good man who truly trusts them." 
He trusted them and, despite the calumnies heaped 
upon him for his heresies and his love of the black 
man. a great body of the people trusted him, follow- 
ed him, and, after his untimely death, carried for- 
ward his work for the liberalizing of thought, for 
the broadening of education, for the systematizing 
of philanthropy, for the equalizing of opportunity, 
for the rescue of a nation of so-called freemen 
from the curse of slavery. He knew what de- 
mocracy means, be believed in democracy, and he 
felt certain that if he placed his precious ideas and 
aspirations in the keeping of the common people, 
those thoughts and hopes would come, as fifty years 
later they are slowly coming, to full fruition, both 
in the lives of men and in the conduct of society. 



148 New England Conscience 



VIII 

Abraham Lincoln 

IT is a waste of time, most persons will agree, 
to try to prove that Lincoln was a sort of 
supernatural being sent to save the United 
States. It is doubtful, even, if he should be 
called a political genius. He appeared at 
that supreme crisis because, as all history shows, 
every really great national need brings to the front 
its organizers and true leaders of men. 

The wonderful thing about Lincoln was not the 
strange chain of events which brought him to the 
presidency, not the astonishing ability with which 
he, a novice in war, met the terrible demands of 
those four years ; it was the homely skill, the dogged 
persistency, the serene courage by which he lifted 
himself out of the squalor of a "poor-white" home 
up to the largest position of personal responsibility 
that has come to any ruler in human history. 

Every^ one is familiar, of course, with the succes- 
sive steps of his extraordinary career; but to under- 
stand that career, it is necessary to put aside the 
glosses and glamors which hero-worshipping biog- 
raphers have thrown about Abraham Lincoln, and 
to regard him simply as a man of the people who 
used his knowledge of, and his power with, the plain 
people to give him, in the last years of his life, moral 
command over the supremest crisis in the history of 
government. There is no solid ground for the 



Abraham Lincoln 149 



catchpenny phrases: "Lincoln the Inspired," "Lin- 
coln the Saint," "Lincoln the Genius." He was 
none of these; — he was simply "Lincoln the Man." 

He was born in a poor-white cabin in Kentucky 
— and I use the term, "poor-white," advisedly. It 
is true that his ancestors were sturdy Puritan folk 
from Hingham, Massachusetts, but it does not take 
more than two generations, if conditions are un- 
lavorable, for the best Puritan stock — outwardly, 
at any rate — to degenerate; and there seems no real 
reason to believe that Lincoln's father was anything 
better than a poor-white loafer married to a woman 
superior indeed to him, but very little superior to 
the rest of the roving, shiftless population which 
wa;> once so numerous in the Western and Southern 
Alleghanies. He had one great advantage, of course, 
in that for generations his people had been pioneers, 
had lived rough lives in the open, and had develop- 
ed a largeness of limb and a strength of constitu- 
tion which Abraham Lincoln inherited and which 
were at the foundation of his great career. 

When Lincoln was seven his shiftless father shift- 
ed to Southern Indiana, where, two years later, 
the boy's mother died, and whence the father went 
back to Kentucky for a second wife. She was a 
thrifty and intelligent widow, and, as Lincoln's 
step-mother, was a genuine good angel in his life. 
For she made a decent home for him, smoothed 
down his uncouthness, and not only urged him, but 
helped him so far as she could, to get some knowl- 
edge of books and to develop those powers which 
had thus far been asleep within him. In all, how- 



I50 New England Conscience 

ever, his schooling did not cover a single year. 

From Southern Indiana his father floated on 
unpaid mortgages into Central Illinois, vi'hich, from 
Abraham's twenty-first year until he went to Wash- 
ington in 1 86 1, was — with the exception of one 
term in Congress — the theatre of Lincoln's dra- 
matic and epoch-making career. 

From earliest childhood the boy worked, not 
only for his father, but for others to whom his labor 
was hired out, and he worked effectively, because of 
his health and strength, at whatever he undertook. 
The tradition regarding him, however, is that he 
was lazy, which means probably that he preferred to 
read, think and dream rather than to split rails, hoe 
corn, and feed the pigs. Those readings, especially 
of a volume of the Statutes of Indiana, which came 
into his hands, and those dreams, which must have 
been of a political career, led him after more or 
less adventure as a flatboat hand on the Mississippi 
in the Black Hawk War, as a most incompetent 
storekeeper in a collapsed "boom" village, and as a 
deputy surveyor, to take Up, when he was about 
twenty-five years old, the study of the law. 

Preparation for a legal career at the frontier was 
not severe, and Lincoln's knowledge when he was 
admitted to the bar, and established himself at 
Springfield, in 1837, must have been extremely 
scanty. But he possessed to an extraordinary degree 
that main reliance of even the most learned lawyer, 
— knowledge of human nature. This, together with 
his intellect and his homely but racy wit, gave him 
a command of juries, and attracted to him clients 



Abraham Lincoln l^l 

for whom the profoundcst knowledge of legal mat- 
ters would have counted as nothing. 

In viewing Lincoln's rapid rise into political 
prominence in Illinois, one must not forget that in 
a frontier community men are so shut ofif from other 
things of civilization that politics becomes a leading 
interest. Moreover, Illinois, perhaps because it is 
half Yankee and half Southern, has always been a 
rich field for political discussion and for the rearing 
of that type of man to whom politics is the breath 
of life. In such an atmosphere, Lincoln, who had 
extraordinary political shrewdness, who loved the 
game of politics, and who had far higher visions 
than even he himself appreciated, had also personal 
qualifications which made the step from obscurity 
to local fame comparatively easy. In the rough 
and tumble of frontier elections, he could not only 
hold his own with his tongue, but he could whip 
any man who dared to tamper with him. He was 
so close to the soil that he had no class prejudices to 
overcome. His very ugliness and awkwardness, 
coupled with the keenness of his jests and the raci- 
ness of his stories, made his public appearances real 
entertainments for a people hungry to be amused. 
Above all, he was honest through and through, and 
such downright, courageous honesty as his is certain 
to command respect, and, if it be coupled, as it was 
in Lincoln, with common sense, is equally certain 
to secure power. 

His unswerving honesty with himself and with 
everybody else, and the clearness of his political 
vision, led him, moreover, to identify himself with 



152 New England Conscience 

the minority, — and therefore reform — party in Illi- 
nois, that of the Whigs. Being a minority candi- 
date, his first efforts at political office were, of 
course, vain; but his physical and mental strength 
and his power to win men, soon brought him what 
was really a personal victory, as representative to 
the Illinois legislature. He made, however, no 
great impression there, except as a member of the 
small group of giants known as the "Long Nine," 
who succeeded in having the Capitol of Illinois 
transferred to Springfield. It is difficult to point 
out just the moment when Lincoln emerged from 
obscurity as an acknowledged leader of politics in 
his adopted state; but the fact in his career which 
brought him national fame and which, therefore, 
led to his nomination for the presidency, was his 
opposition to Stephen A. Douglas, the man who for 
the fifteen years preceding i860, was the idol of the 
Democratic party. 

Of all the strange coincidences in Lincoln's life, 
none is more singular than the linking of his for- 
tunes with those of Douglas. Meeting, as young 
men, in the city of Springfield, the one hailing, as 
the Westerners say, from Kentucky, and the other 
from Vermont, these two strong individualities 
came into early clashing over the affections of that 
Miss Todd who was afterwards to become Mrs. 
Lincoln. But they were political rivals also, in a 
contest which was to last more than twenty years. 
Douglas had, however, every apparent superiority. 
He was scholarly, well-trained as a lawyer, of agree- 
able, even hands(>»^^ presence, and an early leader 



Abraham Lincoln 153 



in that party, the Democratic, which was on the top 
wave in both state and nation. With these ad- 
vantages he ran, of course, far and fast ahead of 
Lincoln, so that, at the time when the latter was 
only an obscure member of the Illinois legislature, 
Douglas was not only Senator in the National Con- 
gress but was so much a leader in Washington as 
to be regarded as in logical succession for the presi- 
dency. Every year, however, Douglas' position be- 
came more difficult, for he had to steer a safe course 
between the fire-eating Southerners who were forc- 
ing an ever wider extension of slavery, and the rap- 
idly growing northern sentiment, which demanded 
that the "peculiar institution" should not be carried 
north of Mason and Dixon's line. At this vulner- 
able point in Douglas' power and popularity, Lin- 
coln struck again and again until he finally gave 
him his political death-blow. 

Lincoln's famous war of words with Douglas, it 
should be emphasized, was not over the abolition of 
slavery, but was solely over the question of the ex- 
tension of slavery. As far back as the making of 
the Constitution, slavery had been a troublesome 
issue ; but as that great document had to be a suc- 
cession of compromises in order to get ratified at all, 
this burning problem was then smothered. It 
smouldered until 1820, when it was again quieted, 
men thought forever, by the Missouri Compromise, 
through which Missouri was admitted as a slave 
state on the agreement that slavery should not be 
extended north of 36° 30' or west of that State. 
Thereafter, in order to keep the balance of the 



154 New England Conscience 

Senate equal, states were admitted in pairs, a south- 
ern and a northern one together. The supply of 
northern territory, however, was so much greater, 
that, to maintain this balance, the Southerners 
brought on the Mexican War and the annexation 
of Texas, a step which made the slavery question 
flame up again. It was quenched for a time by the 
Clay Compromise of 1850, which tried to get rid 
of the slavery question mainly by ignoring it, and 
by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. 

Meanwhile Lincoln had built up a fair practice in 
the city of Springfield, first with Stuart as his 
partner, then with Logan, and finally with Hern- 
don ; had served, as the only Whig from Illinois, in 
the 30th Congress; and had so offended his con- 
stituents by his honest attitude towards the Mexi- 
can War, that he had failed of re-election. This 
was in 1848, and during the next six years he set- 
tled into the pursuit of the law, seemingly but 
mildly interested in the great game of politics. Then 
in 1854 came the Kansas-Nebraska bill, with what 
was in effect a repeal of the Missouri Compromise, 
and the whole question of slavery blazed up again. 
The Whigs, free-soilers, and anti-Nebraska demo- 
crats coalesced into the Republican party, Lincoln 
was righteously inflamed, and he was at once pushed 
forward as the Republican champion to oppose 
Douglas, who, as chairman of the Committee on 
Territories in the United States Senate, had con- 
trived this infamous piece of legislation. 

During those succeeding six years, Lincoln and 
Douglas pursued one another hotly in a race, first 



Abraham Lincoln 1 55 

for the Senatorship, and then tor the Presidenc> ; 
their main theme of contention being slavery. The 
most dramatic as well as the most important phase 
in this fight of political giants was the series of 
debates that opened the campaign for the U. S. 
Senatorship. Douglas had been nominated by the 
Democrats, and Lincoln by the Republicans, and in 
accepting his nomination, Lincoln had used those 
fateful words, "A house divided against itself can- 
not stand," which placed squarely before the country 
the real issue between the North and South. Lin- 
coln challenged Douglas to a series of joint debates, 
seven in number, which took place during the hot 
summer of 1858 in different towns of Illinois. Lin- 
coln lost the Senatorship, but he did it deliberately 
by trapping his opponent into a statement which 
would gain for Douglas the temporary support of 
the legislature of Illinois, but which was sure so 
to split the Democratic Party that the presidency 
would be thrown into the hands of the Republicans. 
Lincoln never did a shrewder thing than when, in 
the course of those debates, he made Douglas assert, 
in regard to the famous Dred Scott decision — a de- 
cree of the Supreme Court which declared the Mis- 
souri Compromise unconstitutional — that since slav- 
ery could not exist if it were not protected by the 
local police, a state really had the power to exclude 
slavery by refusing to protect it. This flimsy argu- 
ment satisfied Douglas' constituents temporarily, 
but it wrecked the Democratic party, the extreme 
Southerners refusing to support Douglas after he 
had thus, as they said, deserted and betrayed them. 



156 New England Conscience 

The Democratic nominating convention of i860 
split squarely in two; and while Douglas was nom- 
inated by the Northern Democrats, Breckenridge 
was chosen, in a rump convention, by the South- 
erners. This made it certain that the Republican 
candidate would be elected. Intense interest cen- 
tered, therefore, in the Republican convention, which 
was held, in Chicago, May 16, i860. The three 
logical candidates were Seward of New York, the 
acknowledged leader of the party, Chase of Ohio, 
and Lincoln of Illinois. Seward led on the first 
ballot, but had not a majority. Shrewd trading on 
the part of Lincoln's managers brought him almost 
even with Seward on the second ballot ; and on the 
third he forged so far ahead that Ohio, by trans- 
ferring four votes, gave him the nomination. By 
so narrow a chance as this was the Union saved ; 
for, had Seward been nominated, it is humanly cer- 
tain that compromise would have followed com- 
promise until a permanent division of the United 
States would have been the only way out. A split- 
ting between North and South would have doubt- 
less been followed by other divisions, until we would 
have become a second Central America. 

In November, i860, Lincoln was elected; and 
this choice meant the secession of South Carolina 
and the other cotton states. Between November, 
i860, and his inauguration in March, 186 1, was 
the most critical period in all our history; for the 
feeble and utterly discredited Buchanan could do 
nothing, even had he wished, to stay the preparation 
for war and the consolidation of those Southern 



^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^Kr^^^^^^^^H 


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^i^^SHf^ ■ i^^^H 




^^^^^^ '^- '^M 


^^^H '' "^^^i^l 


^H-jflH 


^v l^^lSl^H 




I 


^^^^^^^^^x ^JjS^L^Jl 


J 



AiiRMiAM Lincoln 



Abraham Lincoln 157 

states, and the transfer to their forts and arsenals 
of a great stock of federal arms and ammunition. 
All the other great leaders of the Republican party, 
meanwhile, were preaching compromise and conces- 
sion, were urging peace at any price, and were 
openly flouting Lincoln, who, helpless to act until 
the 4th of March, could only iterate and reiterate 
his determination to make no compromise with 
slavery, to give no aid and comfort to disunion. 
Had he yielded one inch, the South would have 
been master of the situation. As it was, six states, 
in December and January, seceded, and on February 
18, 1 86 1, set up the Confederate Government with 
Jefferson Davis as its President. 

At last the terrible four months were over, Lin- 
coln had reached Washington without being assas- 
sinated, and in his inaugural had made clear the 
single present issue between North and South, — the 
issue of Union. Simply and quietly the President 
declared that "no State can lawfully get out of the 
Union" and that he would "hold, occupy and possess 
the places belonging to the Government." This 
meant war; but neither section wanted to begin. 
The crucial point was Fort Sumter, in the harbor 
of Charleston, South Carolina, where Major Ander- 
son, with a handful of troops, was virtually in a 
state of siege. To succor him meant the begin- 
ning of real hostilities; to abandon him meant sur- 
render to the Confederacy. Lincoln took the first 
alternative, notified the Southern commander that 
he would send provisions to Anderson, and, as a 
result, Sumter was fired on and, just four years 



158 New England Conscience 



before Lincoln's death, this most bloody and fateful 
of civil wars began. 

In entering upon the Civil War, Lincoln ex- 
hibited in the highest degree not only that political 
wisdom for which he was so conspicuous, but also 
a serene confidence in the outcome of the conflict 
that seems incredible. For he deliberately brought 
together in his cabinet elements which, to a less 
far-seeing man, would have seemed to make political 
harmony impossible. As Secretary of State he ap- 
pointed Seward, his chief rival for the presidency 
and a man who had never hesitated to show his 
supreme contempt for Lincoln's powers; as Secre- 
tary of the Treasury he appointed Chase, his sec- 
ond most formidable rival; and, after Cameron had 
proved himself incompetent as Secretary of War, 
he invited to that most important of offices Stan- 
ton, an arrogant, overbearing man who had de- 
nounced and traduced Lincoln scurrilously from the 
day of that President's nomination. He put in Blair, a 
southerner, though opposed to disunion, as postmaster 
general, and filled the other cabinet offices with 
heads of factions. Moreover, a majority of these 
men had formerly been Democrats, while Lincoln 
himself had been a Whig; and the only thing upon 
which, in the beginning, this strange official family 
seems to have agreed Is in believing Lincoln utterly 
incompetent for the work ahead of him. How con- 
scious the President must have been of his own 
power and of the righteousness of his cause to dare 
to make this bold political stroke! And what 
magnificent politics, in the high sense of the word, 



Abraham Lincoln 1 59 



it was! For by taking his cliict political rivals 
into his cabinet, he stopped them from headinfj; 
cabals and coalitions against him; by including the 
chief intellectual leaders of both parties he made 
sure that those brains shoidd be used for him in- 
stead of against him ; by taking men of different 
parties and factions he made sure not only of hold- 
ing those factions, but also of stimulating a healthy 
rivalry. Only a man of extraordinary mental and 
moral courage would have dared, however, to take 
a step that, if unsuccessful, would have wrecked 
him, the party, the government and the Country 
itself. 

No one today needs, of course, to be told, in de- 
tail, of the Civil War: but we do need to be re- 
minded that, until the Battle of Gettysburg, it 
was, for the Union side, a losing conflict. Even af- 
ter that invasion of the North was stopped, there 
was many a day when the fate of the Union hung 
in the balance, until the summer of 1864, when 
Sherman divided the South by his march to the 
sea, and Grant began his scientific investment of the 
Confederate capital. And at every hour was Lin- 
coln confronted by the danger of foreign alliance 
with the Confederacy, a step that, unless check- 
mated by general European war, might have been 
fatal to the Northern cause. Naturally of a most 
melancholy and brooding temperament, the Presi- 
dent had, nevertheless, in order to avert national 
panic, to appear — publicly, at least — at all times 
optimistic, confident, certain of the fortunate out- 
come of the war. And he had to be this in face of 



i6o New England Conscience 



difficulties scarcely to be imagined. 

The country had no such resources as it has to- 
day; it was peculiarly poor because just recovering 
from the distressing panic of 1857. The very fact 
— glorious as it was — that the flower of Northern 
youth went to the front, made the difficulty of or- 
ganizing an army great, since either they all wanted 
to be officers or else their very possession of brains 
made it hard to mold them into those unthinking 
parts of a machine which an efficient rank and file 
must be. And the task of building up a great fight- 
ing machine was made ten times more difficult by 
the fact that the spoils system — in which, by the 
nature of his political education, Lincoln believed 
— was rampant at Washington. Therefore every 
appointment, every contract, had to be considered 
not simply on its merits, but also with regard to its 
political effect; and the days and nights of the 
great leader, which should have been sacred to the 
working out of the vast national problems, must be 
largely wasted in stormy interviews with place- 
hunters, spoilsmen, greedy contractors and their sub- 
servient Congressmen. The resulting scandals we 
would forget except as they threw added sorrows 
and burdens upon Abraham Lincoln. 

And the advice that he received ! — beginning with 
the thinly veiled orders and demands of his own 
cabinet and going down to the wise recommenda- 
tions of the remotest cross-roads grocery. Ever>'- 
body except the President knew just how to end 
the war, and told him so. But his patience, his 
humility, his courtesy were limitless; and it was 



Abraham Lincoln l6l 



only when he felt absolutely sure, that he went 
straight ahead regardless of every obstacle and every 
contran,- adviser. It was only seldom that he an- 
swered as he did the delegation of magnates from 
New York who, telling him how many millions 
the}' represented, practically ordered him at once 
to build some sort of vessel strong enough to pro- 
tect New York against that new engine of destruc- 
tion, the famous Merrimac. "Gentlemen," re- 
plied Lincoln, "if I were as wise as you think you 
are, and if I were as rich as you say you are, and if 
I were as scared as I see you are, I would build 
that vessel myself and make a present of it to the 
government;" whereupon he turned on his heel 
without another word. 

Lincoln was the ven,' spirit of democracy, was 
the personification of all that is best in the his- 
tory of America ; for his life is what that of every 
citizen should be, — a union of idealism with high 
common sense. He saw visions, but he did not 
try to reach them by flying; on the contrary, he 
plodded along the dusty highroad of hard-headed 
practicality. He was unalterably convinced that 
he was right; but he neither despised nor berated 
others for being wrong. He was patient, with that 
lofty serenity w^hich knows that all God's ways are 
sure. He was tolerant, with that spirit which un- 
derstands that ignorance, not wilfulness, keeps men 
in the wrong. He was optimistic, with that deep 
wisdom which, perceiving every obstacle in the path- 
way, yet sees that time will conquer all. He was 
tactful, with the true instinct of a child, humble 



1 62 New England Conscience 

with the humility of the really wise, loving, merci- 
ful, and forgiving, with the limitless breadth and 
charity of a noble soul. 

His single aim in life was to fit himself for service 
and then to serve, — his friends, his party, his state, 
his country, the cause (greater than state or nation) 
of fundamental justice and eternal right. He 
showed how any youth, no matter from what pov- 
erty and ignorance, can exalt himself into a moral 
icing of men; he proved what unremitting work 
can do; he demonstrated that the only road to en- 
during success is the straightforward path of 
honesty; he proved again that righteous courage 
wins; he exemplified the everlasting truth that the 
sheet anchors of life are the great moral issues. 

There seems then, nothing of sacrilege in 
saying — so like was Lincoln to the Master, so 
closely did he follow in the steps of that earlier 
Emancipator — that martyrdom was a fitting end 
and crown of his career. And we as a nation may 
today soberly rejoice and say, using his own incom- 
parable words, that we feel a "solemn pride" in 
having "laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of 
freedom." The sacrifice of Lincoln, the sacrifice 
of the thousands of his people, vvill have been, how- 
ever, vain, if we of the next generation do not fight 
the modern bloodless battles for freeing mankind 
from suffering, selfishness and evil in the same lofty 
and self-forgetting spirit as that of those who, under 
the leadership of Lincoln, fought the great military 
battles of the Civil War. 



The Heart of the United States 163 

IX 

The Heart of the United States 

** m M ^HE centre of population, now in In- 

■ ^diana, is traveling straight towards the 

■ middle point of Illinois. The cen- 
I tre of manufacturing has reached as 

•^^ yet only eastern Ohio, but is march- 
ing in a bee-line for Chicago." This, the Illinois 
boast, is perhaps with somewhat rare coincidence 
the truth; and that state, in more than one mean- 
ing, is soon to be the controlling Heart of the 
United States. Therefore it is of vital, as well as 
of curious interest for New Englanders — fast be- 
coming mere onlookers in the national administra- 
tion — to examine and, so to speak, to auscultate this 
organ which will increasingly regulate the body 
politic. 

Illinois drips fatness. Its black, oozy soil which 
eagerly devours one's shoes; its corn that, refined 
by selective processes, almost exudes oil ; its hogs 
that can scarcely see through the deep folds of their 
unctuous envelope ; its beefsteaks, pork-chops, and 
corn-cakes, glistening from the ceaseless sizzling of 
the frying pan ; its very speech, with mouthed syl- 
lables and exaggerated "r's," — all are fat with a fat- 
ness almost indecent to the spare New Englander. 
Moreover, the oleaginous carnival seems only just 
begun. Fertilizers and nitrogen -col lectors are mak- 
ing the sand-dunes blossom; swamp-draining and 



164 New England Conscience 



well-driving are equalizing conditions of moisture; 
rotation of crops is averting possible soil-exhaustion ; 
while scientific breeding is enriching the com at will 
and is blanketing the corn-fed hog with ever thicker 
layers of obesity. 

To classify the huge stockyard industries as 
agriculture, is to place Illinois first among the 
farming states. To call them manufactures — and 
the people of Chicago generally do both — is to give 
her the rank of third among industrial common- 
wealths. She needs no forced construction of words, 
however, and she is not dependent upon Chicago 
alone, to put her in the forefront of manufacturing 
communities. For, having learned how to extract 
a high caloric from her low-grade coals; having 
begun, in dearth of other large mineral deposits, to 
coin her clays into those bricks, tiles and cements 
which, with steel, are the essence of modern build- 
ing; possessing lake, river, steam, and electric 
transportation uninterrupted by any mountain or 
desert barriers, she is creating enormous enterprises 
which will soon place her at the very head. 

Illinois takes toll, too, upon most of the main high- 
ways of Americ?. In the wide area between the At- 
lantic Ocean a..d the Rocky Mountains she stands 
at the middle point. The raw and manufactured 
products of the earth — north, south, east, and west 
— must, in our seething traffic, surge largely through 
her territory; she is, and from geographical neces- 
sity must always be, the chief sluiceway for this 
ceaseless flood of things. More than this, the multi- 
tudinous sea of restless Americans — old ones and 



The Heart of the United States 165 



new ones — pours into and through her avenues of 
travel. Unlike New York and Boston, mere filters 
through which the immigrant stream rushes or 
trickles, leaving behind the scum and dregs of alien 
peoples, Illinois is a smelting-pot in which the 
stronger and more active foreigners are fused with 
one another and with the older stock into real Amer- 
ican citizenship. 

The established population of Illinois, moreover, 
is already a remarkable alloy of North and South; 
for, from Chicago down to a line passing irregu- 
larly through its centre, the state is of Yankee ori- 
gin, having been settled mainly by New England 
pioneers; but from the Ohio River north to that 
irregular line, the Illinois stock is distinctively south- 
ern. The "Egyptians," as they call the natives ot 
Cairo, Thebes, and other grotesque namesakes of 
Old Nile, are in looks, in dialect, in habits of 
thought, and in instincts and traditions, markedly 
of the South. 

An immigrant who gets as far from the coast as 
Illinois is almost certain to become Americanized, 
?ince the journey to the Atlantic is too great to be 
.aken often, and there can be, therefore, little of 
that sailing back and forth which makes the immi- 
grant of the seacoast cities frequently a denation- 
alized being, severed from the old world, but not 
yet joined to the new. But in the smaller cities 
and in the towns of Illinois, as well as in those of 
other Middle West States, amalgamation has so 
far progressed that one may say: here is social and 
political America as it will be when immigration 



1 66 New England Conscience 



shall have become normal, when the unsettled spaces 
shall have been filled up, when the face of sub- 
stantially the whole country shall have become thick- 
sown with towns joined to one another and to the 
great cities by every form of present and yet undis- 
covered means of intercourse. 

Such is the Illinois of today. In primeval times, 
however (that is, about a generation ago), she was 
as lean as she now is fat. The state has not simply 
gained materially, — she has been regenerated; she 
is a Cinderella translated from the ashheap to the 
palace among states. Less than forty years ago Illi- 
nois was a place disheartened. New Englanders, tired 
of attempting to raise crops on stone-heaps, had gone 
hopefully out to this frontier where a pebble is a 
curiosity. Southerners, set adrift by war or averse to 
working with emancipated blacks, had come North 
to make fortunes out of corn. The Easterners, how- 
ever, still clung to the primitive agricultural meth- 
ods of New England, while the Mississippians tried 
to cultivate cereals in the same way as cotton. The 
breaking up of so much virgin land, moreover, opened 
a very Pandora's box of miasmic fevers. A people 
who knew nothing of the habits of the mosquito 
fought the "chills," as they indiscriminately called 
the fevers, with whiskey and quinine. Two-thirds of 
the population of the Southern Illinois bottom-lands 
died, in those pioneer days, of malaria and of dis- 
eases which found ready entrance into constitutions 
weakened by its assaults. The chills, the bad whis- 
key, and the adulterated quinine, produced a type lit- 
tle more ambitious than the Georgia "Cracker." The 



The Heart of the United States 167 



once active Yankee, weakened by malaria, depressed 
by the flat monotony, contaminated by the shiftless- 
ness of his poor-white neighbors, became even more 
inert than they ; and thus was produced the typical, 
hideous Illinois landscape of about 1 880. 

Treeless distances were broken only by rare bits 
of "timber," or by hedges of the melancholy osage 
orange, planted as breaks against the frightful winds. 
Roads that were impassable for a third of the year, 
mountainous with ruts for another third, and whirl- 
ing dustbreeders during the remainder, sprawled un- 
tidily in miscellaneous directions. There were no 
bridges to speak of; but there were fearful mud- 
fords called "slews," into which one plunged at a 
terrifying angle from the hither brink, through which 
the natives urged the horses or oxen by merciless beat- 
ings and incredible oaths, and out of which it seemed, 
as in "Pilgrim's Progress," impossible for such sin- 
ners ever to emerge. 

The so-called towns, clinging here and there tq 
the single-track railroads, were mere huddles of one- 
storied shacks, pretending to be two-storied by the 
palpable device of a clap-boarded false front. At 
long distances from these towns, and from one anoth- 
er, would be found a house, single-roomed, with a 
cock-loft, and set upon stilts to form a shelter for 
the pigs. Its front steps were a slanting board, like 
the approach to a hen-roost, and it was swept inside 
and out, above and below, by every blast from Heav- 
en. Outside the door, just where the sink-spout 
emptied, would be dug a shallow well, its water so 
rich in lime as actually to taste of It, and as a con- 



1 68 New England Conscience 



sequence so hard that a person who should spend 
his whole life in Illinois would be a sedimentary de- 
posit of the dust and mud of all his days. Scattered 
around were a few sheds to give pretense of shelter 
to the ill-kept cattle; scattered still farther around, 
and shelterless, were agricultural machines, once cost- 
ly, but now rusted and practically useless; and 
spreading away as far as one could see was an ocean 
of the Illinois staple, com. 

Were the harvest promising, however, along came 
the chinch-bug, the army-worm, or the locust, to eat 
it clean, or the prairie fire to burn it. Were it 
brought actually to the point of a fine harvest, there 
would be no demand, or the rickety railroads would 
be so choked with freight that the grain could not 
reach a market, and must be used for household fuel. 
Working listlessly in those fields were gaunt men, 
shaking with "chills;" in that shanty were a gaunt 
woman and many cadaverous children, also shaking 
with chills, the lives of all of them a seemingly 
hopeless struggle against the elements, sickness, poor 
food, and the uncertainty of "craps." 

So far as they could navigate the prairie and the 
"slews," the people were hospitable, and at harvest- 
time the neighbors over a wide circle would, in turn, 
help each the other with his crops. At funerals, too 
— almost the sole diversion, — friends and relatives 
would come from far and near, and would encamp 
for a fortnight upon the bereft, eating in melancholy 
festivity the funeral fried meats. Religion, like every- 
thing else, was rugged and strong, for the pains of 
eternal damnation were far more conceivable than 



The Heart of the United States 169 



the blessings of paradise. Schools were scarce and 
doctors scarcer. In short, there was found in Illi- 
nois at that time frontier life with none of the ex- 
citement which comes from the dangers of explora- 
tion, but with all the discomfort arising out of 
remoteness from even the rudiments of civilized 
existence. 

What has transformed the fever-stricken, mort- 
gage-ridden, and poverty-blasted Illinois of the 
eighties into the thriving, hustling heart of the 
United States? Two things: modern science, and 
real, effective education. Draining the fields and 
discovering the proximate cause of malaria practic- 
ally destroyed the chills and fever; extending and 
modernizing railroad and steamship lines gave ready 
access to the markets of the world ; the telephone put 
an end to the horrible isolation and loneliness of the 
farmhouse ; the interurban trolley-line made path- 
ways over the muddy prairies and bottomless 
"slews ;" cement manufacturing enabled the smallest 
hamlet to build sidewalks and even to pave streets; 
while, as for education, the farmers have been sys- 
tematically and wisely instructed how to make farm- 
ing pay. 

This education of the farmer has been carried on 
in at least two ways. At the time when the face of 
Illinois was that of grim desolation, certain shrewd 
investors — notably some from Great Britain — bought 
up, for the proverbial song, great areas of these 
poorly tilled farms from their ague-stricken owners, 
and began to cultivate them in wholesale, scientific 
ways. So large grew these foreign holdings — in 



lyo New England Conscience 

some cases embracing the greater part of a county — 
that the state government became alarmed and 
passed legislation forbidding the inheritance of land 
excepting by bona fide citizens of Illinois. These 
and other extensive farms, however, all skilfully 
and very profitably developed, served, and still serve, 
as well-appreciated object lessons to the lesser own- 
ers, and have done much to revolutionize the farm- 
ing methods of the entire Middle West. 

The main work of education, however, has been 
performed by the state, entering the field as a prac- 
tical teacher of scientific farming. The State Uni- 
versity and Agricultural Experiment Station together 
began the work, fifteen or twenty years ago, of find- 
ing out what might be the best crops for Illinois, how 
those crops could most profitably be raised, in what 
ways they might be increased ; and then, of teaching 
all this to the adult farmer through farmers' insti- 
tutes, local experiment stations, and demonstration 
trains, and to the farmer's son through courses in 
agriculture in the University. 

The State University cannot be acquitted of all 
ulterior motive in this; on the contrary, it deliber- 
ately developed this sort of education in order to 
catch the farmers' votes. For years that State Uni- 
versity had been going to the capitol, humbly beg- 
ging for ten thousand or twenty thousand dollars, 
and finding it almost impossible to secure even that 
pittance from rural members who could see nothing 
for them, directly or indirectly, in the University. 
But when Dr. Andrew S. Draper was made presi- 
dent, he and some of his colleagues among the trus- 



The Heart of the United States 171 



tees and faculty determined to win the farmer vote 
by proving that the University could put millions of 
dollars into the pockets of the farmers by increasing 
the yield of corn, by teaching how to utilize swampy 
and sandy lands, by improving the breeds of cattle, 
by developing dairying, etc. Nobly the University 
fulfilled its self-imposed task, and generously did the 
farmer-legislature respond with appropriations, so 
that toda\- it gives millions where formerly it be- 
grudged ten-thousands. 

Other elements, of course, have entered in. The 
rapid growth of the University of Chicago has 
spurred the country districts into a rivalr>' most prof- 
itable to the State University at Urbana; and a 
florid type of advertising, appealing to the aver- 
age Westerner's love of bigness, has been used with 
consummate skill. Whatever the means, however, — 
and they have all been honorable, if more breezily 
Western than those to which the East is accustomed, 
— and whatever some of the ill eflfects upon the 
University, the results in the state as a whole have 
been little short of magical. For the University in 
its campaign for votes and funds, has not stopped 
at the farmers. It has sedulously catered, too, in the 
good meaning of that word, to the manufacturers. 
The engineering side has grown even faster than the 
agricultural; and its schools, housed in a number 
of well-designed buildings, are fast taking high rank. 
These schools are making themselves directly useful 
to the state, among many other ways, by conducting 
experiments upon the low-grade coals of Illinois, 
burning them with every sort of grate-bar, under 



172 New England Conscience 

every conceivable condition, and in all kinds of mix- 
tures, in order to determine in what ways they may 
be made to produce the most power at the least ex- 
pense. They are carri'ing on an elaborate series of 
tests upon concrete, plain and reenforced, to ascer- 
tain the value of the various mixtures and the be- 
havior of this new building material under all man- 
ner of demands. And in cooperation with the Illi- 
nois Central Railroad and the interurban railways, 
the University maintains two elaborately fitted dyna- 
mometer cars, running them for long distances, and 
placing the results at the disposition of the state. 

What have been some of the effects, from the 
standpoint of a casual Easterner, of the enormous and 
comparatively sudden development of this great, 
pivotal state? The characteristic most obvious, as 
has been said, is that of omnipresent fatness, and of 
the materialistic attitude of mind which such plen- 
teousness breeds. Fertility, be it of fields or of 
beasts, is a topic which never wearies, and which 
makes one feel at last that the very sows and corn- 
stalks are in a conscious race for fecundity. The 
stockyards are proudly shown, not as a triumph of 
modern ingenuity, but as a spectacle of animals by 
the acre. The increased oil of the selectively bred 
corn is exhibited, not as an intellectual conquest of 
the chemist, but as a feeder of hogs still fatter than 
before. Even the frenzy of the wheat-pit, and the 
fortune-hunting schemes which rob the poor of their 
savings, are attempts to make money breed faster 
than it has any right, or real power, to do. 

The dominant note in conversation, therefore, is 



0y 



The Heart of the United States I73 



that of gain, — gain in acreage, gain in yield, gain 
in income ; and to one who looked no farther it 
would appear that the mass of the people are sor- 
did and materialistic, are mere worshippers of the 
fast-waxing dollar. It is this superficial materialism, 
with its fungus-growth of hideousness, that makes the v ^ ^ 

New England traveler condemn, in large part, Chi- ^ uj^ 
cago. A lake-front unsurpassed in possibilities of \^^" 
beauty is usurped by the tracks and purlieus of an 
ill-kept railroad. Business streets that, ten years 
after the great fire, promised to be almost grand 
in their width and perspective, are now mere smoky 
tunnels imder the filth-dripping gridirons of the ele- 
vated railways. State Street, which then had the 
elements of a noble main avenue, aflFronts one with 
the unspeakable lines of cast-iron department stores. 
Palaces on certain avenues are cheek-by-jowl with 
dilapidated hovels: the semi-detached villas farther 
out of town are, many of them, wretchedly be- 
draggled; and the whole impression left by large 
areas is a mingline of interminable clothes-lines and 
flaming, peeling bill-boards. The city's buildings are 
black with the smoke blanketincr the skv; factories, 
each more hideous than the other, intrude almost 
everywhere : and the vile river, only partly cleansed 
hv the drainage canal, makes even suicide abhorrent. 
One does not hesitate thus to scourge Chicago, for 
she has no excuse. She cannot plead newness, for 
she is no younger than Cleveland, which is beautiful ; 
she cannot plead swiftness of growth, for the mag- 
nificent city of Berlin has developed quite as rap- 
idly as she. 



174 New England Conscience 

Leaving Chicago, however — and the city has an- 
nexed so much territory that it takes an hour or two 
to do so, — and getting out upon the uncontaminated 
prairie, one realizes that this vast area of farms 
and towns and small cities is a very different thing 
from the Babel metropolis; and it is this rural Illi- 
nois which is the true flesh and blood of the great 
heart of the United States. The Atlantic seaboard 
states, with the ocean in front of them and the moun- 
tains behind them, with Europe and South America 
and the islands of the sea feeding them with ideas 
more or less new to the United States, will never 
wholly lose their individuality. The Pacific states, 
for like reasons, will have distinctiveness for all time 
to come. But the enormous basin between the Ap- 
palachians and the Rockies will, as it consolidates, 
grow, like its monotonous plains, more and more 
indistinguishable, the one section from the other, 
until it will think and act and live substantially as a 
unit, dominating by its bulk and the vastness of its 
homogeneity the political life of the United States. 
As the advance type of what this interior empire is 
to be, — indeed as the dominant pioneer which will 
largely impose its own characteristics upon that ex- 
tensive area, — Illinois should have the careful study 
of all thoughtful Americans. 

The first characteristic which strikes one in the 
Illinois people is their friendliness. It is said of 
the Australians that the question of ancestry is ta- 
booed in polite society, lest investigation hark back 
to Botany Bay. While the Middle Westerners have 
no such fear, while most of them, did they choose, 



The Heart of the United States 175 



could go back to the purest Southern and New Eng- 
land strains, so many of them have come "out of the 
ever>\vhere" that they do not stop to inquire who 
was a man's grandfather, but, on the contrary, bid 
him welcome without even waiting to be introduced. 
The old hospitality of pioneer days has survived, and 
opens the house without apology for its shortcomings, 
or lamentations that it is not more fit. This kind 
of hospitality, unfortunately, is becoming obsolete 
in Massachusetts, where today, in order to see his 
neighbors, a man must put on evening dress, play 
bridge, and eat caterers' ice-cream. 

A second thing which impresses a New Englander 
is the restlessness and abruptness born of lifelong 
"hustle." The people of Illinois are in too much 
of a hurry to mind the little niceties of etiquette; 
they say the blunt thing because it takes less time 
than courtesy; their behavior in the hours of sup- 
posed relaxation is that which the Massachusetts man 
keeps for his office, where he has to be brusque in 
order to get through. This gives everything in 
Illinois an air of ceaseless business, and leads to the 
unwarranted conclusion that all Westerners (as 
some of them do) sleep in their working clothes. 

A third characteristic of the people of the Middle 
West is their large view of things, or, to speak more 
accurately, their way of looking at things in the large. 
Because of the habit of ploughing fields by the square 
mile and of killing pigs by the carload, the man of 
Illinois deals in commercial ideas by the vard, not, as 
Easterners do, by the quarter-inch. He plays for 
high stakes in business, and if, as is likely, he loses, 



176 New England Conscience 



he plays again. Whether he is up or whether he is 
down seems to matter little, provided he keeps in 
the game. This sweeping habit of mind, however, is 
fatal to fine analysis; and while, for example, the 
Illinois teacher is ready to try splendid, comprehen- 
sive experiments in the schools and colleges, while he 
handles the problems of education as Napoleon 
handled strategy, he is lacking in intellectual dis- 
crimination and finesse. As a result of this habit of 
mind, most of these Middle Westerners seem to the 
Easterner superficial and inclined to accept what 
Gelett Burgess so cleverly calls "bromidioms" for 
revelations of new truth. 

What strikes one most startingly, however, in the 
people of Illinois is their lack of imagination. This, 
moreover, is a fundamental deficiency. They are a 
plains people, with no mountains to vary their view- 
point, no changes of altitude to foster modifications 
of temperament, no salt breezes to make their brains 
tingle, no expanse of ocean, no beetling clifFs, no 
roar of breakers, no play of color upon the sea, no 
awfulness of tempest on ocean and on mountain, none 
of those natural phenomena — except perhaps cyclones 
— which are absolutely essential, not only to the mak- 
ing of poets, but also to the developing of the hum- 
bler imaginations of Tom, Dick and Harry. Of 
course many of them travel, — journeying they treat 
in the same large way as business, thinking nothing 
of traveling four hours by train to buy a spool of 
thread, — but the rank and file of them do not go far 
enough from home ever to see the ocean or to climb 
9 respectable hill, 



The Heart of the United States 177 



There is, therefore, and always must be, over this 
vast central United States this limitation of experi- 
ence which places the natives, figuratively as well as 
literally, upon a lower plane than mountain and 
coast-dwellers. They have some, and will have 
more, idealism ; but it is the idealism of doing things 
on a large scale, not that of seeking to attain such 
perfection as only the highly developed imagination is 
able to portray. Their ideals for America are, and 
probably always will be, sturdy but commonplace, — 
not like those, therefore, of the men who conceived 
the Declaration of Independence and framed the 
Constitution. 

Because of these fundamental qualities, Mr. 
Roosevelt and Mr. Cannon (from Danville, Illi- 
nois) arc to these Middle Westerners the greatest 
and wisest among statesmen. Both these leaders are 
honest, like the average of men in Illinois ; both are 
"hustlers" like them ; the one is nervously busy, the 
other is shrewdly canny, like them ; both are blunt, 
like them ; both are fighters, as those men of Illi- 
nois have had to be ; both lack imagination, and 
therefore utter long-accepted platitudes with the so- 
nority of new-found wisdom ; and, like those folk 
of the Middle West, both are genuine democrats, 
accepting men for what they are, and liking them, 
not because they had good grandfathers, but be- 
cause they seem in a fair way to be good grandfath- 
ers. Political leaders of the Roosevelt and Cannon 
type are doubtless to be, therefore, the very highest 
which we can ever reach in statesmanship, and de- 
mocracy of the Illinois type is to be the standard of 



lyS New England Conscience 



the twentieth century. 

New England must recognize this, accept it, and 
govern herself accordingly. She must appreciate, 
not only that she never again can take that leading 
part in the councils of the nation which she held for 
a hundred 3'ears, but also that she must never ex- 
pect to see the kind of democracy which was the ideal 
(however inadequately reached) of the Atlantic 
states when they were the leaders of America. The 
democracy of the government is henceforth to be that 
of the great Central Plain, a democracy much more 
widespread but far less fertile of great men and of 
high aspirations than was that of the first century 
of our national life. Mediocrity is in the political 
saddle ; and the business, therefore, of the educa- 
tional, as distinguished from the political leader is 
to provide that type of common schooling which shall 
tend to uplift mediocrity rather than, as is the usual 
result of our present methods, to perpetuate medi- 
ocrity, and to discourage even the gifted youth. 

Hence the role of Massachusetts, with her history, 
her climate and topography, her lead as the best 
educated and the most "otherwise-minded" (that is 
to say, the most uplifted above mediocrity) state of 
the Union, with her inheritance of sea-power and her 
nearness to Europe, — her special role under the new 
order is to develop, through the intelligent education 
of the many and through the special training of the 
few, the exceptional man, whether in literature, art, 
science, statecraft, commerce or manufacturing. 

Massachusetts cannot compete with the thousand- 
acre farms of Illinois, in that species of agriculture; 



The Heart of the United States 179 



but she can hold her own and can excel, even with 
her tiny holdings, by stimulating that intensive farm- 
ing which makes an acre of swampland yield more in 
point of value than a square mile of prairie. She 
cannot manufacture in a large way, as the West and 
South can, close as both are to the raw material, and 
accustomed as the former is to dealing with large 
propositions ; but she can make the finer and the 
finest things, most of which now come from abroad, 
but all of which might readily be fashioned within 
the four boundaries of the commonwealth. 

Massachusetts can solve the hard problems of nur- 
turing and training the most highly skilled workmen, 
if she will utilize the energy of the men and women 
who are eager and fit to make a sound study of that 
vital question. The state can produce, not only great 
artisans, but great artists, if she will but give that 
encouragement which has always been essential to 
their flowering. And those great colleges and schools 
for which the commonwealth is justly famous can 
keep themselves at the front as leaders and inspirers 
if they will be true to that idealism which, from its 
very founding, has been the life and soul of Massa- 
chusetts. 

The deservedly large and phenomenally growing 
state universities of the Middle West will, for- 
tunately, press these Massachusetts institutions hard ; 
but they can never catch up if the education of the 
commonwealth keeps going too. These western uni- 
versities will lose breath in the running, for two 
reasons: first, because they must always keep an eye 
upon politics and must often do, not what they know 



i8o New England Conscience 



to be educationally right, but what they are 
certain the people will demand, — and that people, as 
has been seen, is governed by mediocrity; secondly, 
because these state universities must dovetail in with 
the common-school system and must admit practically 
every public-school boy or girl who can show a very 
moderate proficiency. Therefore no state-supported 
university in a democracy can ever compete on equal 
terms with one privately endowed, which has none 
to placate excepting the alumni, and which may weed 
out its student body just as far as it thinks necessary 
to maintain the highest standards of efficiency. 

Massachusetts, however, has many things to learn 
of the opulent, optimistic Middle West, and it is 
greatly to be wished that every citizen of the Bay State 
might spend at least one year of his early manhood in 
such a state as Illinois. Indeed, our educational sys- 
tem will not be complete until it is made possible 
for a youth seeking a higher education to take his col- 
lege and professional course partly in the East and 
partly in the West, the leading institutions having 
put themselves, for that purpose, on some common 
basis of scholarship requirement and each having con- 
sented to give, like the state law, "due faith and 
credit" to the educational work of all the others. 

Could the great bulk of "leading" Massachusetts 
men be induced to make even a temporary acquaint- 
ance with the spirit of the people of the Middle 
West, they would discover that the Hub of the Solar 
System has been moved, and that an attempt to make 
a close corporation, capitalized upon ancient prestige, 
of Bostonianism is to invite commercial, industrial, 



The Heart of the United States l8l 

and intellectual dry-rot. Too many native Boston- 
ians are of the mind of the aristocratic lady from 
Cambridge, who, late in life, was induced to spend 
a few weeks at Gloucester, and who announced to 
her amazed friends on her return that she had met 
there quite a number of excellent persons whose 
names even she never before had heard. Massachu- 
setts men, too, were they to go West occasionally, 
would learn the merits — as well as the demerits — 
of "hustling," and would perhaps acquire some of 
that simple, hearty friendliness which so lubricates 
the machinery of social intercourse. 

There are, however, more specific and important 
things for Massachusetts to learn from Illinois. She 
ought, above all, to adopt the well-considered plan 
— almost magical in its effects — of scientifically ex- 
ploiting her resources, and teaching her farmers, mer- 
chants, manufacturers, importers and exporters what 
the state is capable of doing. It is a trite saying that 
only a few of the possibilities of a human being are 
developed in the ordinary course of a man's or wom- 
an's life. It is still more true, however, that but the 
merest beginning has been made in the development 
of the resources of Massachusetts or of any other 
state of the Union. 

The forests, in a political division so small and so 
densely peopled as is Massachusetts, would seem 
hardly worth consideration ; yet, were even the rudi- 
ments of the science of forestry comprehended by the 
farmers, immense areas of land, now waste, might be 
made to yield, every thirty or forty years, a crop 
of great value. The applications of chemistry to 



1 82 New England Conscience 

farming have so revolutionized this industry that — 
including these forest areas — there is scarcely a foot 
of the bleak soil of Massachusetts which might not 
be made profitable. Her conformation provides 
hundreds and thousands of little water-courses, 
which, properly utilized, might be made, by electrical 
transmission, large sources of manufacturing power. 

The Bay State has no coal-beds; but she has 
enormous areas of peat, to utilize which is now a 
theoretical, and soon will be a practical, possibility. 
With her many cities and large towns, and with the 
growth of rapid transit, dairying, market-gardening, 
and the raising of fowls may be indefinitely extended, 
with increasing profit to both producer and con- 
sumer. Above all, with a long seaboard protected 
by encircling capes and presenting many safe har- 
bors, with ample water-powers, with a comparatively 
dense population providing, together with immigra- 
tion, an abundant supply of potential workmen, and 
with her long history of manufacturing prowess, 
Massachusetts should always remain great among 
industrial states. 

For such a development of her resources, the com- 
monwealth needs to study and heed the example of 
the Middle West: that of educating her citizens in 
the fundamental principles of production and distri- 
bution, and in the application of those principles to the 
requirements of modern life. The world today is a 
world of applied science; and the line of develop- 
ment to be followed — especially in such states as 
Massachusetts — is that of the application of science 
to agriculture, to manufacturing, to commerce, to 



The Heart of the United States 183 



transportation, and, not least, to education. The 
states of the Middle West — many of them daugh- 
ters of Massachusetts — have clearly pointed out the 
way ; it is for Massachusetts to profit by their exam- 
ple and to recover, in leadership along these modern 
lines, the educational prestige which, in the ancient 
and now outworn paths of learning, she for so many 
years maintained. 



184 New England Conscience 

X 

The Eternal Feminine 

JOHN FISKE, in his lucid way, shows that 
civilization has arisen largely from the simple 
fact that the young of man are born, and for 
some years remain, so helpless that abandon- 
ment means death. He might well have gone 
farther and maintained that the evolution of man- 
kind out of savagery has been due, not simply to 
the helplessness of infancy and the consequent neces- 
sity for family life, but also to the fact that the rear- 
ing of children has been so largely in the hands of 
women. It is the eternal feminine transmitted to 
men in their blood that keeps them as decent as they 
are; it is that eternal feminine deified for them in 
the impossible woman whom, in youth, they worship, 
that changes them from cubs to men; it is the 
eternal feminine with which, personified, callow 
youths "fall in love" that not only civilizes the indi- 
vidual but is gradually bringing towards genuine civ- 
ilization a large portion of mankind. 

Woman possesses the eternal feminine by the grace 
of God. Man cannot possess it except in that vile 
counterfeit, effeminacy; in that pale reflection of it 
which comes sometimes through asceticism; or in 
some abnormal instance where the man must play 
the mother's part. It is the absolute, spiritual sex- 
distinction which no propaganda for equal suffrage, 
no striving for economic equality, no affectations of 



The Eternal Feminine 1 85 



the "bachelor girl," — which not even feminine smok- 
ing, drinking and swearing can ever wholly nullify 
or efface. 

The obvious good, to men, of the eternal feminine 
is that of physical protection. It is the vigilant fe- 
male hand which snatches Tommy from under horses' 
hoofs while the unheeding father dashes across the 
street. It is the mother who gauges mittens, rub- 
bers and other impedimenta to those weather changes 
which make no impression upon the harsher male. It 
is the anxious feminine parent who fills the little boy 
with necessary — and, alas, with many superfluous — 
fears and precautions while the father, stoutly though 
quite ineflFectually, is maintaining that experience is 
the sounder guide. A woman's ceaseless and thank- 
less vigilance preserves many an obstinate urchin 
from an early grave, saves many a wilful youth from 
pneumonia, maintains intact the horrid qualities of 
many a curmudgeon. On the other hand, it smooths 
the path and makes possible the great work of count- 
less prophets for humanity. So many men, however, 
are saved by some patient woman only to do her and 
the community mischief, that were this the sole, or 
even the main, function of the eternal feminine, it 
would be, in the long run, of doubtful value to hu- 
manity. 

Fortunately, however, while men are being soft- 
ened, spoiled and made monsters of egoism by this 
phase of femininity, they are at the same time being 
regenerated and uplifted by its many other manifes- 
tations. Like the spear of holy legend, the gift of 
healing in the eternal feminine far transcends its 



1 86 New England Conscience 

power to wound. On this more subtle side, it is the 
greatest ethical force in the development of human- 
kind. 

I have said, speaking for my sex, that the eternal 
feminine can never be ours to possess. But as in the 
case of spendthrift heirs with prudent trustees, the 
whole income is for us to squander while the real 
owners of that most precious of all capitals have only 
the doubtful privilege of maintaining and investing 
it for us to expend. In what manner is this unfail- 
ing income paid over to us — as a rule — ungrateful 
beneficiaries? It is given, in the first place, through 
our blood ; for one of the many extraordinary privi- 
leges of boys is to "favor" (if one may use that most 
expressive Yankee word) their mothers. Next, the 
income is paid in the form of good precepts poured 
unceasingly by mother, aunts, grandmothers, pains- 
taking school-teachers and candid sisters into our 
capacious and unheeding ears. Thirdly, the in- 
come takes the shape of good example given us, 
not by the aunts and grandmothers, who spoil us, or 
by the school-mistresses, who harry us, or by the sis- 
ters, who infuriate us; but by the silent instances 
of tenderness, of heavenly unselfishness, of "that firm 
love which chasteneth" given to us night and day by 
those true mothers of whom the world is full. Again, 
that income comes to us through chivalry, which is 
aroused in us by mother-love and which, as adoles- 
cence progresses, is transferred from her to that 
sweetheart with whose impossible perfections every 
youth having a spark of imagination endows some 
girl, — or series of young women. But the income 



The Eternal Feminine 187 



of the eternal feminine comes to us far more subtly 
and abidingly through the fact that our early years 
arc spent mainly in the company and under the 
influence of women, and that our thoughts and feel- 
ings — profoundly as the man in us may think it 
despises them — are really women's thoughts and 
women's feelings. That tincture which the child and 
boy receives and which he never can eradicate from 
his nature is the very essence of the eternal feminine. 
The male point of view, because of this, is in each 
generation fundamentally modified by the feminine 
way of looking at life. Therefore when a man, out- 
lagcd by the protean sensualities of life, sickened by 
the manifold ugliness of existence, disgusted by the 
mean wickedness of human intercourse, made cynical 
by the hypocrisies of both saints and sinners, is sorely 
tempted to give up striving and hoping and believ- 
ing, the feminine in him, — illogical, unreasoning, 
careless of past experience and heedless of future dif- 
ficulties — goes winging up to those absurd ideals 
which never can be reached, but which, nevertheless, 
are the celestial magnets that uplift mankind. All the 
altruism in the world — and there is more now than 
ever before — all the unselfish love of one's fellows, 
all those yearnings towards impossible good, all the 
hitching of lowly wagons to unreachable stars, arc 
due to that element in us which we cannot describe, 
cannot define, cannot analyze, but which we know 
as the eternal feminine. 

Childish innocence is not mere ignorance of evil ; 
it is the original fund of good born with every one. 
To preserve as far as possible and to utilize to the 



1 88 New England Conscience 

highest degree this primal innocence is the really im- 
portant business of all education. The conserver of 
that innocence is the eternal feminine implanted in 
the child by the mother's influence, and preserved and 
established in the youth by that complex emotion 
which is called true love. 

The story is told of a city "tough," on trial for 
vagrancy, who swore that he had no parents. "Why," 
said the judge, pointing to a drunken creature sit- 
ting in the courtroom, "that woman says she is your 
mother." "Sure," replied the boy, "she's my mother 
all right ; but she ain't the kind o' mother a feller's 
got a right ter have." That waif touched the very 
centre of this problem of morality. A fellow who 
hasn't the right sort of mother has but a sorry chance 
of turning out well. The mother may not, and need 
not, be very wise ; she need not be of the anxious 
kind that dogs his footsteps ; she may well be one of 
those whom the world calls stern ; but if she be a 
true woman, if she have that seventh sense which 
comes with maternity, if she have but little more than 
the primitive instincts of the dam, — then, in greater 
or less measure, she is the sort of mother a "feller's 
got a right to have" and that son will receive and 
retain, through her, as he can in no other way, the 
major part of that moral equipment and that ethical 
incentive which are to make his life worth while. 

Says Tennyson : 

"... From earlier than I know 
Immersed in rich foreshadowings of the world, 
I loved (a ) woman . . . one 



The Eternal Feminine 189 



Not learned, save in gracious household ways 
Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants, 
No Angel, but a dearer thing, all dipt 
In Angel instincts, breathing Paradise, 
Interpreter between the Gods and man . . . 

Happy he 
With such a mother! Faith in womankind 
Beats with his blood, and trust in all things high 
Comes easy to him, and tho' he trip and fall 
He shall not blind his soul with clay." 

Death, or worse, robs some boys of the first and 
greatest influence of the eternal feminine, — that 
which should be exerted through the love of mother 
and son ; but to no normal youth is the second influ- 
ence of femininity — that which comes through adora- 
tion for some transfigured sweetheart — wholly de- 
nied. It may be but poor Hodge grinning through 
a horse-collar, it may be but the stammering worship 
of a cub for some woman old enough to be his moth- 
er, it may be but the frosty thawing, late in life, of 
some seemingly hopeless bachelor; yet in the life 
of almost no man is the experience entirely un- 
known. 

This second phase of the eternal feminine, this 
love of a man for a woman, is, of course, the main 
foundation of literature, of art, and of that royal 
romancing to which, very mistakenly, we limit his- 
tory. The widely read book without a love mo- 
tive is as rare as the historical event wherein one may 
not confidently "seek the woman." Yet, in most of 
those million real and imagined instances, how crude 



igo New England Conscience 



and clumsy, — yes, how vulgar — is the analysis of the 
true influence and the actual effect of the eternal 
feminine. To fathom and describe real love is a 
task requiring transcending genius, a task of which 
only a few men, like Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe 
have been capable. The lesser men writers (except- 
ing a few like Meredith) and especially the lesser 
women writers, confuse genuine love and its influ- 
ence with its counterfeits — lust, jealousy, self-seek- 
ing, vanity, the mere strut of the male, and their long 
train of evils. Real love, in its modesty, its purity, 
its unselfishness, its self-abnegation, its worship, its 
moral exaltation, is as remote from the simian in- 
trigues of the popular novel as Heaven is from the 
city slum. Real love does not love a woman, it loves 
an ideal ; and in so far as the personification of that 
ideal, the actual woman upon whose shoulders, so to 
speak, its mantle falls, approximates to or comes 
short of that ideal, the man's life is made or marred. 
As far as concerns the real things of life, — character, 
moral strength, unselfishness, right ambition, altru- 
ism, — the school of the boy is not in the schoolroom, 
it should be in the home ; and the true college of 
those enduring qualities is not in Harvard or Yale 
or any other high institution of learning, it is in the 
discipline of a man's first — and generally his last — 
genuine love experience. 

I would not imply, of course, that falling in love is 
the beginning and end of existence ; what I do main- 
tain is that whether a man is to have a large nature 
or a small one, whether he is to be a dynamo or a 
vegetable, whether or not he is to possess that love 



The Eternal hcininine IQI 



of mankind, that eagerness to serve and uplift his 
fellows which is what counts in life, depends enor- 
mously upon the purity of his ideal of the eternal 
feminine and upon the measure in which that ideal 
is realized in the woman he loves. The perfection of 
the ideal depends superlatively upon the boy's moth- 
er; the degree of that ideal's realization rests almost 
solely with the woman to whom he dedicates his 
heart. 

It ma.\- be frankl\ acknowledged that the ordinary 
boy is prurient and somewhat foul-minded. If, how 
ever, his parents are fairly wise, if his boy friends arc- 
wholesome and his girl friends decent, this disquiet- 
ing phase in a boy's life — which, after all, is mainly 
physiological — \\'\\\ pass and leave him fundamental!}- 
unstained. But he does not traxersc the next crisis 
so easily. That crisis, called "falling in love." comes 
at least once before he has reached his majority, and 
while it has many foolish phases a-ul accompani 
ments, it is generally, nevertheless, the crucial and 
determining experience of a man's whole life. For 
adolescence is the second birth — to use Dr. Hall's 
apt phrase — of a man, the birth into moral and 
spiritual life; and falling in love is to that spiritual 
infancy what walking and talking are to genuine 
babyhood. If a youth gets safely through that crit- 
ical period, if he finds a woman who not only just 
then but for all their lives will preserve and strength- 
en his moral side ; or if, thwarted or disillusioned in 
his affections, he rises above instead of succumbing 
to the blow, his future usefulness and satisfaction in 
life are almost certainly assured. But if, hurt in hi-^ 



192 Neiv England Conscience 



pride and disenchanted of his visions, he becomes 
cynical, reckless, and unambitious, there are imme- 
diately bred in him selfishness, sensuality, moral lazi- 
ness and rank materialism, — and another child of 
God has become indentured to the devil. 

It is a just criticism of contemporary novels and 
plays that an inhabitant of Mars, reading the one 
and witnessing the other, would conclude that our 
minds dwell ceaselessly upon sex problems ; whereas, 
we well know, the normal man or Avom^n is mainlv 
busy with quite other affairs. Yet, while the healthy, 
manly man is little concerned with sex, it is nev- 
ertheless true that — except for some very rare re- 
ligious upheaval — the great emotions of his life, those 
which lift him out of egoism, materialism and the 
almighty dollar, are sex emotions, and that those agi- 
tations are most violent, least understood, and farth- 
est reaching during adolescence. If, in that time of 
storm and stress, that j^outh has not the anchorage of 
love for his mother and chivaln^ towards women ; 
if, having created the image, as most youth do, of 
an ideal woman to be worshipped and obeyed, he 
finds the young women of his environment too far 
below that standard of perfection,— then it is almost 
certain that, whatever his physical and mental prow- 
ess, morally and spiritually that youth will go to 
wreck. In reading that extraordinary book, "The 
Ordeal of Richard Feverel," one gains some notion 
of what strong youth, — young men who are sure to 
amount to something very good or very bad in the 
world — go through with in this period when, to the 
outward eye, they are merely awkward and taciturn 



The Eternal Feminine 193 



or disagreeably voluble. Like the shoppers in Paris 
who gayly walked the boulevards unconscious that, a 
few blocks away, hundreds of human beings, with 
ever>' shade of courage and of cowardice, were fight- 
ing for life in the burning Charity Bazaar, we adults 
go heedless on. unconscious or forgetful that all 
around us are callow yovith fighting with every de- 
gree of courage, or yielding with every shade of cow- 
ardice, in the battle for self-salvation. 

Fathers and mothers, however, have no right to be 
heedless. The former's memory, the latter's instinct, 
should not permit them to leave the boy, unprepared 
and unsupported, to win or lose the battle as he can. 
And woe to them if they rush in at the eleventh hour 
and expect to accomplish, by a day's prayers, en- 
treaties and commands, that to which they should 
have given eighteen or twenty years of ceaseless en- 
ergy. The father who keeps spiritually aloof from 
his son until that boy is approaching manhood and 
then dares to talk to him of such things as love is 
certain to be flouted, — as he deserves to be. The 
mother who presumes to dictate her son's choice in 
his affections when she herself has given him no right 
example of womanhood has but herself to blame if he 
breaks her heart by his choosing. To assert that a 
mother who stays at home with her boys and girls 
makes herself their drudge is to be blind to the mean- 
ing of real motherhood. It is true that a cook can 
prepare the children's dinners and that a sempstress 
can mend their clothes ; but can a cook fit a boy for 
the crisis of adolescence, can a sempstress mend his 
ruined career? 



194 New Eti,^land Conscience 



There is no question of women's rights and wom- 
en's privileges excepting the right to be of the most 
value in the world, the privilege of using her special 
powers to the highest good of mankind. Much of 
the world's work may be done bj^ either man or 
woman ; but there are certain duties which only one 
or the other can perform. And if a woman have 
children, her immediate and paramount duty is to 
keep her covenant with God by giving those boys 
and girls the best bringing up that it is possible for 
them to have. In the matter of that one duty, no 
other person or agency can take her place, for none 
other can get the moral hold which, because of the 
child's early and entire dependence upon her, she 
is able to secure. The community cares nothing about 
the individual child ; the school can deal with chil- 
dren only on one side; the church can secure but a 
precarious hold upon a small proportion of them ; 
and the best intentioned of fathers, even if he for- 
sook his special duties as the provider, would be but 
a feeble substitute for the right kind of mother. 

Human customs help greatly in the bringing up of 
girls, for those conventions keep the daughters close 
at home, sheltered from serious contact with the evil 
things of life. Boys, however, early and properly, 
escape the mother's immediate control, going where 
she cannot follow, learning from sources that she 
cannot supervise, meeting outer contaminations and 
inner temptations which she can hardly comprehend. 
Yet boys need moral guidance even more than girls, 
and, great as are the power and the duty of the father 
in furnishing that moral education, the responsibil- 



The Eternal Feminine 195 



ity and influence of the mother, for reasons already 
indicated, are very much greater. And she must ful- 
fil that duty and exercise that control largely through 
the power of the eternal feminine, which permits her 
to control the boy, though out of her sight, and to 
hold him w ithout his suspecting the anchorage of the 
despised apron-strings. 

In at least four ways will the eternal feminine 
keep the adolescent youth straight and strong and 
self-respecting. The first is through conscious wor- 
ship of and loyalty to his mother — provided she has 
been the "sort o' mother a feller's got a right ter 
have" — holding him back, as would her actual pres- 
ence, from what he knows would hurt her. The 
second way (if he has been rightly reared) is through 
chivalry towards all women and through a dim un- 
derstanding that some time, not far ahead, the 
eternal feminine will be made concrete for him, and 
that every moral transgression will be a hideous 
and perhaps insuperable obstacle in the path to that 
woman's love. The third way is through the un- 
conscious influence of the girls and women that he 
meets, who, if they have been rightly brought up, 
should fulfil to a reasonable degree his boyish visions 
and idealizations of the sex. The fourth and final 
way is through the wholly unperceived, because in- 
grained, promptings of the eternal feminine wrought 
into him by years of loving companionship with his 
mother, — promptings which, like wini^s. lift him 
above dirty, evil and sordid things and keep him in 
the noble company of those who obey Paul's injunc- 
tion: "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever 



196 New England Conscience 



things are honest, whatsoever things are just, what- 
soever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, 
whatsoever things are of good report . . . think 
on those things." 

As the possessor of this priceless power of the 
eternal feminine, this power which inspires and pre- 
serves most of what is best in humankind, woman, 
without flattery, is unquestionably the superior of 
man and is the predominant force in compelling the 
upward and onward progress of the world. What 
folly for her, then, to waste her strength in seek- 
ing so-called equal rights in the matter of those out- 
ward, material relations which are of such minor 
consequence in the eternal scheme. Could she have 
political and economic equality with men, could she 
be hail-fellow with them and still retain the eternal 
feminine, then speed the day of her alleged emanci- 
pation ! Seemingly, however, the possession, at once, 
of both masculine rights and feminine power is, and 
always will be, quite impossible. 

A woman is not inherently incompetent to exer- 
cise the franchise, to conduct a commercial enterprise, 
or to live the free life of a man. In the face of so 
many examples to the contrary, especially in view of 
the general belief that hers is the keener and shrewd- 
er mind, such a contention would be ridiculous. 
Great questions like this, however, must be looked 
at as a whole; and the fact must be faced that the 
majority of women marry, and that to them and to 
their children the duties of motherhood involve in- 
finitely more than do those of fatherhood to the 
other parent. Were it possible to limit the franchise 



The Eternal Feminine 197 



to spinsters, childless wives and dowagers, there 
could be no serious objection to granting women po- 
litical equality. But in any extension of feminine ac- 
tivities the mothers must be, of course, included; 
and tor them to enter political life — which, if they 
are not to imperil democracy, involves vastly more 
than the mere casting of a ballot — either the new 
duties must be shirked or badly performed (in either 
event throwing political power into the hands of 
those least fit) or the old duties must be neglected, 
to the incalculable damage of the boys and girls, 
whose moral up-bringing means more to the progress 
of civilization than all the ballots ever cast, all the 
taxes ever paid, and all the laws ever put upon the 
statute-books. 

Women in politics might enact much useful legis- 
lation; but the curse of a republic is the prevailing 
notion that moral evils can be cured by laws and 
ordinances ; whereas history and personal experience 
teach that the main hope ol civilization is in the 
arousing of a keener sense, among all men and 
women, of their individual, personal responsibility. 

The single way, moreover, in which that sense of 
personal responsibility for the welfare of the com- 
munity and the state, the sense that we are our own 
an4 our brothers' moral keepers, can be aroused in 
the general mass of men is for it to be ingrained in 
boys and girls as they grow up. And the forces 
which can adequately instill that sense of responsi- 
bility are, preeminently, the home forces: the home 
atmosphere, the home work, the relations of the fam- 
ily, the conscious and unconscious lessons in duty. 



198 New England Conscience 

self-sacrifice, honor and kindred virtues given by the 
father, mother and other members of the house. The 
heart of that little world in which men and women 
are to be trained for the great world, the headmis- 
tress of this school of the home which, from the 
ethical and spiritual standpoint, signifies more to the 
growing child than all the public institutions of 
learning ever created, the power which, from thence, 
literally and in the best sense rules the destinies of 
mankind, is she who keeps the home, determines its 
atmosphere, and directs its energies. Were all the 
good women in the country to get together and to 
secure the right to revise all the statutes and elect 
all the officials, their work would be not only futile, 
it would be subversive of civilization, if, in accom- 
plishing this political revolution they should at the 
same time, as they would be obliged to do, abdicate 
that field in which superlatively the work of char- 
acter-building, of moral development, of instilling 
respect for law, of training to govern one's self and 
others is and must be done, — the field of the individ- 
ual home. Like the dog in the fable, those good women 
would have dropped the bone of real power in at- 
tempting to seize its counterfeit image of political 
dominion. 

Women in business might raise in some degree 
commercial standards and they would certainly se- 
cure a larger measure of economic freedom. But, 
aside from the fact already emphasized that a woman 
rannot engage at one and the same time in making 
laws — or money — and making human characters, the 
wholesale Injection of women into Industrialism 



The Eternal Feminine 199 



means greater competition, lowered wages, and conse- 
quent social degradation. The fact that economic 
failure means suffering for wife and children is a 
hard and galling spur to men ; but that cruel goad 
has been a chief incentive to moral as well as indus- 
trial advancement. 

As to the girl who tries to be a man by aping 
his small vices, by smoking, swearing, and practising, 
in Portia's words, "a thousand raw tricks of those 
bragging Jacks," she is an object as pitiful as is the 
white-faced schoolboy who, having affronted his 
stomach with a strong cigar, thinks he has thereby 
made himself a man. 

A secondar}', but scarcely less serious, effect of 
this so-called emancipation would be to cheapen 
woman in the eyes of man, to destroy for him. there- 
fore, the enormous uplifting power of the eternal 
feminine. No one today admires the languishing 
female of our grandmother's time and most men be- 
lieve that every girl should fit herself for self-support 
so that she may have the strengthening conscious- 
ness of economic independence; but for men and 
women to wrangle upon the hustings, for the arts, 
and worse, of woman to be added to the fund of po- 
litical bribery already at command, for women to 
enter into the feverish scramble for business, and for 
them to meet there and elsewhere every man as 
men now meet one another, would break down all 
barriers — except perhaps the final one — and chivalry, 
romance, emotional devotion, all that service of Ja- 
cob for Rachel which develops a man and makes 
him other than the beasts that perish, would be gone. 



200 New England Conscience 

The so-called subjection (though it is actually 
the elevation) of women is rooted in reasons much 
deeper than those of her physical weakness and the 
selfishness of men. She suffers for sinning as no man 
is made to suffer in order that she may be forced 
to set high standards of morality, — standards to 
which all society is slowly but continuously rising. 
She is made comparatively weak and dependent in 
order that there must be a home to shelter her, 
that home which, as a moral microcosm, is the fun- 
damental unit of society and the essential school of 
individual virtue. She is subject to centuries-old con- 
ventions in order that she may be kept enough apart 
from man for the element of glamor, of worship, of 
aspiration to be worthy of her, to enter into a youth's 
relations with the other sex. Finally, she is tied to 
her children in order that, in the long years of that 
blessed servitude, she may infuse into them, both 
boys and girls, that elixir of the eternal feminine 
which is the inspirer and the conserver of those 
eternal hopes, faiths, and uplifting illusions which 
carry mankind ever nearer to the Everlasting Good. 



Madame de Maintenon 20I 

XI 
Madame de Maintenon 

THE reign of Louis XIV, one of the 
great spectacles of the modern world, 
divides itself into three dramas: the first, 
a farce-comedy of intrigue; the second, a 
melodrama of extravagance and con- 
quest; the third, a tragedy of defeat and death. 
The first act — in which Louis himself had little 
part — was the last struggle of feudalism, a desperate 
clutching of the nobility at their remnants of inde- 
pendent power. Without steadiness, without co- 
hesion, mere puppets in the hands of jealous women, 
the provincial nobles, heretofore petty Icings in their 
power and splendor, made a last vain resistance to 
the Italian, Mazarin, who for selfish ends was sub- 
ordinating all France to Paris and the court. The 
second act was a pompous show of tasteless pleasure, 
of real and mimic war, of unprovoked conquest. It 
was a pageant of kingliness, graced by sycophants and 
supported by sweating millions of unheeded super- 
numeraries. In the third act the scenery begins 
to totter. The king, tragic now, struts and swaggers 
to ever fainter applause. His theatre grows smaller 
and more shabby. Worst of all, those actors who 
had been trained by Bossuet and by Fenelon to fill 
his role, die in quick succession, leaving Louis and his 
baby great-grandson alone, the one too old, the other 
too young, to play the part of King. 



202 New England Conscience 

Louis XIV had nominally begun to rule in 1643, 
when he was five years old. The will of his father, 
Louis XIII, no stronger after death than before, had 
been set aside, and Anne of Austria, with Mazarin, 
had assumed the regency. Their usurpation, the 
Queen's desertion of those who, throughout her 
stormy quarrels with Richelieu, had taken her part, 
the bitter disappointment of that himgry faction 
which, sure of restored power under the queen-reg- 
ent, was already known as les importants, the great- 
er and less intrigue of a corrupt court, — all combined 
to precipitate one of the maddest, absurdest civil 
strifes in history, the wars of the Fronde. On the 
one side of the conflict was Anne — Madame Anne 
the people rudely called her — clinging to the new 
cardinal-minister, Mazarin, with a love as fierce as 
had been her hate of the dead cardinal-minister, Rich- 
elieu ; sending him into exile as their enemies be- 
came too threatening; finding it impossible to live 
as well as to rule, without him ; calling him back to 
substitute his now welcome abuse of power for her 
utter lack of power; and always alienating old 
friends while never gaining new. On all sides of the 
controversy, sometimes for the queen and sometimes 
against her, were the Parlemcnt of Paris, quarrel- 
some lawyers with no positively defined powers and 
no capacity except for ceaseless meddling. In the 
afifraj^ also, were the numerous Orleans family, fight- 
ing for their rights of regency and succession. The 
Archbishop of Paris, too, and the feudal nobles took 
a share of blood and plunder as opportunity offered. 
And back of it all, plotting, lying, deceiving, com- 




M.\I>AMH Dli M.MNTliNON AND Till; 
DuCHliSS OF Hu ROUNDS 



Madame de Maintenon 203 

niandin^, and counterniandinji;, were the Duchcssc 
dc Lon^ueville, Mine, de Chevreuse. the ridiculous 
Grande Mademoiselle and a swarm of other intrigu- 
inij noblewomen, playing at politics and bringing 
upon France such death and ruin and starvation as 
even that revolutionary country has seldom known. 
The whole strife was a war of women, a tragic farce 
of history, in which the actors conspired openly, 
hurled deadly- curses with reassuring winks, kissed in 
the morning and fought at night, laid waste and 
plundered indiscriminately, sister arrayed against 
brother, mother against son. servant against master. 
Yet those wars of the Fronde, brought about partly 
by the desperation of a dying feudalism, partly by 
hatred of a Spanish queen and an Italian prime 
minister, wrought two important changes. They 
destro\ed the independent power of the nobility; 
they centered the life of France at Paris. Thence 
resulted the unified, bureaucratic government which, 
notwithstanding its restless changing of rulers, 
France has ever since maintained. The wars of the 
Fronde not only made possible the autocracy of 
Louis XIV, they prepared the way also for the Rev- 
olution and for Napoleon, (^nly to a country ruled, 
as France is, by a city, would have been possible 
any of those three phenomena. 

Throughout these civil conflicts and for some years 
afterwards, the young king remained indifferent ex- 
cept to this royal pleasures, letting Mazarin rule 
for him as Richelieu had reigned for his predecessor. 
But when, in Louis' twenty-third year, Mazarin 
died, the king coldly dismissed his memory, dismissed, 



204 New England Conscience 



too, the iniquitous Fouquet who had stolen even 
more than had the greedy Italian, and took the bur- 
dens of state directly upon himself. More than this, 
by good judgment or good luck, he put the plundered 
treasury into the hands of that honest man of busi- 
ness, Colbert, he placed Louvois — a seventeenth cen- 
tury Bismarck — in the ministry of war, and he made 
Turenne general of his armies. With such servants 
and by his extraordinary diligence, by his bourgeois 
but most useful love of detail, by his real genius for 
absolute monarchy, Louis brought France in less 
than twenty years after Mazarin's death, to its high- 
est pitch of power and splendor. His methods were 
not exemplary, the proverbial schoolboy can see how 
temporary his greatness was; but, at that stage of 
civilization, it was real greatness, and it was a true 
empire over which the "grand monarch" despotic- 
ally ruled. Had he died in 1680 he would have 
gone into history as one of the few real Caesars ; un- 
fortunately for him and unhappily for Europe, he 
reigned seventy-two instead of forty years. 

With the exception of the interval between 1661 
and 1 71 5, France for nearly two centuries was ruled 
by ecclesiastics. During the fifty-four years except- 
ed, she was governed by a true king ruling, however, 
"with the advice and consent" of women. Just how 
far Louis Quatorze was guided by feminine counsel 
it is impossible to determine ; but to one woman, 
during forty years, he seldom failed to turn for ap- 
proval, for strength in adversity, for commendation 
in triumph, for feminine comfort, for masculine ad- 
vice, — that is, to the Widow Scarron, known as 



Madame de Mainienon 205 



Mme. de Maintenon. Dollinger calls her the great- 
est woman in French history. St. Simon, with the 
exaggeration of hate, terms her an "incredible witch, 
in whose hands rested politics, diplomacy, the power 
of reward, of condemnation, of pardon, of religion 
itself, whose victims were the king and his king- 
dom." The Church leaned upon her, the people 
suspected her, the court feared but could not flatter 
her, and Louis himself, brought by fortune and great 
ministers to an imperial authority far beyond the 
control of his own limited understanding, regarded 
her as a sort of external brain whose sanction gave 
his royal whims and fiats the touch of intellect need- 
ed to make them absolutely infallible. 

In the middle of the seventeenth century social 
France possessed three centres. The supreme cen- 
tre, the "dazzling sun of Europe," as Louis was 
not averse to being called, was the king himself. 
Two lesser orbits were ruled by Ninon de [.enclos, 
the famous courtesan, and by Mme. de Rambouillet, 
the first of blue-stockings. About those two women 
gathered all the wits, men about town, place-seekers, 
men of letters, and precieuses to whom the royal 
sunshine was not always available; and the recog- 
nized path to the more exclusive Hotel de Ram- 
bouillet was through the drawing-rooms of the bril- 
liant and perennial Ninon. A leader of this merry 
procession, a satyr to this lovely nymph, was the 
cynical, deformed comic poet, Scarron, who, no 
longer young and apparently approaching his grave, 
amazed his friends in 1652 by bringing to Ninon's 
salon a wife, Franqoise d'Aubigne. 



2o6 New England Conscience 



This Francoise, afterwards Alme. dc Maintenoii, 
had passed through the usual troubled childhood of 
the heroine of romance and herself tells us that the 
customary prophecj' of future greatness had been 
made regarding her. Of good lineage, she was born 
in prison. Her grandfather was the great Hugue- 
not, Agrippa d'Aubigne; but her father was the 
veriest good-for-nothing, and her mother, a jailor's 
daughter. As a child Francoise was carried to the 
West Indies, experiencing every peril of sea and mis- 
ery of land. Early orphaned, she was tossed about 
from one relative to another, torn from a Protestant 
aunt whom she loved, and banished to the vinegary 
household of a Catholic aunt whom she hated, seized 
in turn by one and the other Christian faith, and 
regarded by both merely as a brand to be saved from 
the burning. With no dowry, and no hope of one, 
with no vocation for the convent, yet seeing no 
escape from it, Francoise was doubtless -jlad of the 
chance to marry Scarron, although she was but six- 
teen and he past middle age, a confirmed invalid, and 
hideous to look upon. For eight years, faithfully and 
tenderly, she nursed this cynical, foul-speaking crip- 
ple, restoring to him perhaps some of the whole- 
someness of life which he had long forgotten. His 
death left her a young, handsome, but discreet 
widow, intellectual if not witty, a welcome visitor 
in the best society and known at court. 

Meanwhile the royal Jupiter of France, tiring of 
Louise de la Valliere, has transferred lu's affections 
to Mme. de Montespan. Her semi-royal children be- 
ing, as yet, politely ignored, must be educated se- 



Madame de Maintenon 207 

crctly; but the king; is determined that they shall be 
educated well. What better governess for them, 
thinks Montespan, than Mme. Scarron, discretion 
personified, well taught, with perfect manners, and 
sufficiently in need to be tempted by the king's 
bounty ? The proposition is made, is strenuously op- 
posed, but is finally accepted in deference to royal 
command. Must not the king be obeyed ; and is a 
woman of ambition, as Mme. Scarron confessed her- 
self to be, to begin her career by forfeiting the fa- 
vor of the greatest of monarchs? Surely not; so a 
house with convenient back entrances is taken, the 
children one by one are smuggled in ; since few ser- 
vants can be trusted, Mme. Scarron assumes much 
of the drudgery herself; de Montespan makes fre- 
quent visits, upsetting the children's discipline with 
her spasmodic afiFection and their digestion with her 
lavished comfits, sometimes violently scolding, some- 
times ardently caressing the patient governess, by 
turns exulting and repenting; and at the front door 
enter the old friends of the Ninon salon and the 
Rambouillet salon, wondering, asking no questions, 
but hastening to spread most scandalous conjectures. 
A difficult life in itself ; made doubly so by the early 
death of some of the children and the sickliness of 
the three who survive. For four years it continues, 
until even Mme. Scarron begins to wonder if the 
game is worth the candle. Perhaps she hints of this 
to the king; perhaps it is only his own sense of jus- 
tice that impels him, in 1673, to acknowledge these 
poor children, — of whom Mme. Scarron had grown 
desperately fond and to whom no mother could have 



2o8 New England Conscience 



been more devoted, — by bringing them to court. If 
the governess expected to better her lot by transfer- 
ring herself and her charges to the palace, she greatly 
erred. Not only was she now brought into hourly 
contact with the capricious, childish, imperious Mme. 
de Montespan, but she began to attract the danger- 
ous favor of Louis who, heretofore, had sneered at 
her as a blue stocking, not hesitating to express his 
aversion to her. The children's good training, how- 
ever, Mme. Scarron's devotion to the eldest, (the 
crippled Due du Maine) and the strong good sense 
and discretion of the woman herself appealed to the 
king. Soon he begins markedly to notice her, with 
what effect upon his jealous favorite it is easy to 
imagine. Montespan, fearful of Scarron's power, is 
yet helpless without the aid of it. Realizing, as she 
learns the masterful will and calm tact of this won- 
derful rival, the weakness of her own petty arts 
and seductions, she can do nothing but redouble them, 
wearying the king with her frantic demonstrations. 
To keep Scarron near is to sign her own death war- 
rant, but to send her away would be, she fears, in- 
stant self-execution. So Montespan covers her chil- 
dren's tutor with reproaches, at one hour orders her 
from the palace, at the next implores her to remain, 
denounces her to Louis and yet begs him to com- 
mand that she shall stay. Mme. Scarron, now Mme. 
de Maintenon through purchase or gift of that 
estate, weeps, protests, tries to present her side of the 
quarrel, threatens instantly to depart, but does not 
go. There is rumor of personal violence between 
the two women. Even the stern Louvois has to be 



Aiadome de Ma'intenon 209 



summoned from the task of war-makinc: in Europe 
to the problem of peace-making within the palace. 
The court is rent with factions, and the unhappy 
sycophants, uncertain of the outcome of the afiair, 
are in an agony of indecision. 

What a comic tragedy! What a bedlam of con- 
flicting ambitions! There sits the poor queen, so 
much a cipher that none thinks of her, afraid even 
to talk with his majesty unless Maintenon be by 
to prompt her: there rails Montespan, no longer 
loved, but holding the king by the fierceness and 
clamorousness of her jealousy, hating her children's 
governess and yet wretched and helpless without her; 
there flutters the silly new favorite, Mile, de Fon- 
tanges, so puffed with pride that she forgets even the 
ordinary decencies; and there really rules Mme. de 
Maintenon herself, torn with everi' emotion, har- 
assed with every care, trying to save some rags of 
outward affection for the queen, misunderstood when 
she counsels Montespan to leave the court, still more 
misunderstood when she seems to acquiesce in her re- 
lations with the king, finding her only consolation in 
the aflFection of the Due du Maine and yet obliged 
to use even this little fellow as a weapon of warfare, 
praying to be released from one of the hardest 
positions in which a woman was ever placed ; and 
\et so fond of power, so hungry for the notoriety of 
this palatial self-sacrifice, so eager, let us try to 
believe, to bring the greatest monarch of Chris- 
tendom back to Christian living, that she cannot tear 
herself away. 

Finally the clergy, hitherto subservient, become 



2IO New England Conscience 



aroused to the scandal of a king who sows wild oats 
at fifty. Eagerly seconded by Maintenon, they try 
to bring Louis to a sense of decency. The task is 
not easy; and the storms continue within the royal 
household until, at the Dauphin's marriage in 1679, 
Mme. de Maintenon is made lady-in-waiting to his 
princess. So, without renouncing that royal favor 
which is her breath-of-life, the badgered governess 
escapes at last from Montespan. That fierce, unhap- 
py woman, however, through pressure of the Church 
and Louis' utter weariness of her, is soon discarded. 
From this time until early in 1684, when she be- 
came the king's wife, de Maintenon filled a very ex- 
traordinary position, a position so extraordinary that, 
as Mme. de Sevigne has said, no one ever occupied 
or ever will occupy such another. The king con- 
sulted her in everything, obeyed her in everything, 
even to the point of showing affection towards his 
wife, until the death of that poor royal shadow ; 
thousands of envious eyes were spying upon her, 
thousands of evil tongues were longing to speak ill 
of her, the manners of the times, the friends who 
loved her, the enemies who hated her, the place- 
hunters who built their hopes upon her, with rare 
exceptions the clergy who should have sustained her, 
were all leagued to force her into taking a false 
step. But with marvelous coolness, with almost su- 
perhuman adroitness, with no help except perhaps 
that of her confessor, the Abbe Gobelin, she retained, 
without stumbling, her wonderful influence over the 
king, and, in proper time after the queen's death, 
made herself the wife of the greatest monarch in 



Madame de Maintenon 21 1 



Europe, at the height of his power, when he might 
have formed any alliance that he chose. The fact of 
the marriage is no longer in serious dispute. It 
rook place, probably on the 12th of January, 1684, 
in Notre Dame, at midnight, in the presence of wit- 
nesses and with the sanction of the Pope. Mme. de 
Maintenon never acknowledged the marriage, she 
never claimed any rights as queen, every scrap of 
paper that might bear upon the matter she scru- 
pulously destroyed ; yet the fact that she was Louis' 
wife was tacitly acknowledged then and is accepted 
now. Moreover, during the thirty-two years of their 
life together he was comparatively faithful to her and 
seemed truly to love and to honor her. By force of 
her extraordinary will she had converted him to so- 
ber living and to an active — indeed, a too active — 
piety. 

But what a life she led! What a price she had 
to pay for her power! There is no affectation in the 
cry of mental suffering, of deathly ennui, of the "van- 
ity of vanities" which fills her letters! She had shak- 
en ofif, it is true, de Montespan ; however equivocal 
her position, she was justified in her own conscience; 
she had brought Louis to a moral life; she was mak- 
ing him really a "Most Christian King." But what 
an existence for a woman of brains, "to amuse," as 
she says, "a man who was no longer amusable ;" to 
be bound absolutely to the will of a despot who de- 
lighted in the minutest details of etiquette, who was 
never tired himself and who believed that no one 
else should weary. When he went on his brilliant 
campaigns, — where, by the way, he never saw a bat- 



212 New England Conscience 

tie, — Mme. de Maintenon must go too. She must 
travel, not as she chose, but as he pleased, over hot 
and dusty roads; she must eat when he bade her, 
must be gay when he told her, must applaud and 
flatter and coax as her old despot demanded. And 
in peace, what a monotonous round of dreary dissi- 
pation. For so many, and at such hours must de 
Maintenon give audience to his Majesty; for so 
many hours must she admit all the court; state af- 
fairs, in the main, have to be transacted in her pres- 
ence; she must allay the obvious irritation of the 
ministers, and appear to take no part in their coun- 
cils; yet must discreetly reply to the king's ques- 
tions, advise him while appearing not to advise him, 
and always conceal from him the fact that she has 
the intellect, the insight, the grasp of affairs which 
his Majesty has not. 

More than this, she has to be a general peace- 
maker for the royal family, an ever-ready diplomate 
in the complicated afFairs of state, an intrigante for 
the good of the Church, and a general confidente 
and go-between for everyone at court. The king and 
his son, the stupid Monseigneur, are always at log- 
gerheads ; it is Mme. de Maintenon who must recon- 
cile and re-reconcile them. The famous Princess 
Orsini, who is to rule the young ruler of Spain and 
to befriend France in the delicate business of the 
Spanish succession, is slighted by the princes, snub- 
bed by the king; it is de Maintenon who, with in- 
finite labor, must repair this diplomatic damage. If 
the ecclesiastics are ready, as they generally were, to 
assure Louis that the king can do no wrong, it is de 



Madame de Alaintenon 213 

Maintenon who must remind him, clearly and for- 
cibly, that he has solemn duties and distinct obliga- 
tions. Through the long desperate years of the 
Spanish succession wars, when Louis, as he once cried 
out, can neither stop fighting nor go on, when, at 
times, France herself seems slipping from his grasp, 
— in these times and in that saddest of all years when 
the Dauphin, the Duke of Burgundy, the Princess of 
Savoy and the Duke of Brittany all die, and to 
Louis is left as heir only a sickly infant great- 
grandchild, it is then that he goes to de xVIaintenon 
for comfort, for courage, for manliness to play well 
his part as king. 

Louis XIV delighted in artificiality and in cir- 
cumlocution. As is the habit of inferior men placed 
in high positions, he hedged himself about with mock 
greatness and created unnecessary obstacles in order 
to gratify his vanity by overcoming them. So arose 
Versailles, seated in an ugly plain, difficult of access, 
expensive to build upon, its grounds laid out in stifi 
gardens as commonplace as his majesty himself. Since 
the region is destitute of water, the king plans vast 
fountains as its chief embellishment, and wastes un- 
numbered lives and livres in trying to fetch the wa- 
ters of the Eure to this sandy desert. Its ruins now 
add a sort of grandeur to the estate of Maintenon 
which the stupendous and abortive aqueduct, in 
its building, made uninhabitable. This comfortless 
palace of Versailles, this unfinished and ruinous 
aqueduct, are fit symbols of the latter half of Louis 
XIV's reign. Instead of seizing the glorious oppor- 
tunities which were easily his, instead of accepting 



214 New England Conscience 



and enjoying his acknowledged position as the great- 
est ruler of his day, the Grand Monarque must spoil 
his career and desolate his kingdom by building up 
impossible conditions and creating artificial obstacles. 
With fatal obstinacy he pursued and clung to the un- 
natural, whether it were the clipping of hedges, the 
restricting of trade, or the dismemberment of em- 
pires. 

It was of this conventional and rigid life that the 
free-spirited Mme. de Maintenon had to be the cen- 
tre; it was upon most shallow, dull and unmoral 
people that her unusual gifts, her sober intellect, her 
consummate tact had to be expended; it was with 
a declining kingdom and an aging king that she had 
to deal; and it was with all that was most wrong, 
foolish and unlucky in Louis' reign that she was 
most closely identified. Francoise d'Aubigne hewed 
out for herself a wonderful career; but over what 
weary obstacles she made her way! 

Her only haven of refuge was St. Cyr, the school 
for girls which she had founded. There, at least, 
she could be herself, could put her brains to good use, 
speak her mind, feel that she was doing honestly 
and seeking worthily. In her work of planning and 
establishing that school Mme. de Maintenon appears 
at her best. But even to that refuge the court soon 
follows her. Before she realizes it, St. Cyr is a pub- 
lic show-place, the vain preceptress has lost her head, 
the girls are being flattered and spoiled, scandal is 
imminent. At once she lays down rigid rules and 
converts the establishment, — which she had planned 
to be unusually free, — into a convent school of the 



Aladame de Maintenon 215 



severest type. 

St, Cyr was the one outside interest that the sel- 
fish king permitted to his wife; and it was the 
oxygen breathed there that gave her strength and 
courage to carry the heavy and heavier burdens 
which, as the affairs of France grew worse, she was 
called upon to bear. As Marlborough and Eugene 
won victory after victory, as Blenheim, Ramillies, 
Oudenarde and Malplaquet left France weaker 
and poorer and more humiliated, the popular storm 
that had begun with the Revocation of the Edict of 
Nantes burst upon de Maintenon and, a: times, en- 
dangered her life. The censure that the people dared 
not visit upon the king was hurled against her in 
pamphlets, in street songs, in gibes, in scurrilous let- 
ters. She was regarded as Louis' bad angel, she was 
accused of every crime; — of instigating the Revoca- 
tion, of pushing the Spanish claims, of urging wars, 
of fostering extravagance, of herself stealing mil- 
lions of livres from the royal treasury. It was even 
hinted that for some unexplained reason she had 
poisoned Monseigneur and the Dauphin. It is this 
conception of her, heightened by St. Simon's slanders, 
which has come down to us. This foul harpy, to 
most persons, represents Mme. de Maintenon. Truly 
she was not a saint; but to the unprejudiced eye it s 
plain that she never used her piety to cloak personal 
corruption or malice; that she never ceased to pray 
and to argue against all warfare; that, with every 
opportunity, she never used the public funds, — liv- 
ing, indeed, in a fashion almost austere ; and that, 
hounded by begging, place-hunting relatives and 



2l6 New England Conscience 



friends, she seldom misused her power for their ag- 
grandizement. 

In person Mme. de Maintenon was more majestic 
than handsome, her face was intellectual rather than 
strictly beautiful. In manners she was suave, oblig- 
ing and possessed of marvelous tact. Her mind was 
of English solidity rather than of Gallic quickness; 
therefore her letters, while interesting, well-ex- 
pressed, and often witty, have little of the sparkle 
of Mme. de Sevigne's. She had an infinite capacity 
for work, a genius for administration, and a fond- 
ness for managing, even to the point of meddling. 

The most conspicuous, the most admirable trait 
in Mme. de Maintenon was her absolute self-con- 
trol. She was inordinately ambitious, she hungered 
for admiration, she thirsted for power; but she 
knew that discretion, dignified humility and studied 
self-effacement must be her weapons of conquest; 
and she used them with the skill and persistency of a 
great general. It was not her beauty, it was not 
her wit and learning, least of all was it mere good 
luck that created her social fortunes; it was brains. 
With cleverness alone, however, she would have been 
a mere adventuress, like a thousand others. For her ca- 
reer were needed other attributes which in generous 
measure she possessed : a sturdy conscience and an 
intense womanliness. She did her full duty as Scar- 
ron's wife, she neglected nothing in the rearing of 
Montespan's children, through every provocation she 
never forgot her obligations to their mother. In the 
midst of a corrupt court, the hourly companion of 
men and women who felt themselves bound by no 



Madame de Maintenon 217 



earthly and few heavenly laws, called upon to deal 
with the affairs of nations, to confer with and to 
influence statesmen and diplomatists, to play a man's 
part as adviser of Louis, to intrigue against the wili- 
est ministers and ecclesiastics of Europe in one of 
the most complicated political dramas ever played, 
de Maintenon never lost a fraction of her womanly 
grace, her dignity, her modesty, one might almost say, 
her girlishness. 

Hers was the power of the magnet which, seem- 
ingly inert, attracts and holds with astonishing force. 
Having by her care of his children, her womanly 
qualities, and her tact, won Louis, she never re- 
laxed her domination over him, never neglected the 
slightest tiling which miglit increase her hold. Doubt- 
less she honestly believed in her mission to convert the 
king to godliness; but her zeal in that direction did 
not cause her to forget that she hoped, too, to make 
Mme. Scarron powerful. Hardly expecting, perhaps, 
to become Louis' wife, she intended to become at 
least his master. Having attained the greater prize, 
her secrecy regarding the marriage was but another 
triumph of diplomacy. The mystery surrounding 
them, tile consciousness that he might without scan- 
dal retreat from them, did much to keep the fickle 
king faithful to his vows. Moreover, with the mar- 
riage acbiowledged, Mme. de Maintenon would 
have been merely a despised and neglected morganat- 
ic wife; as it was she retained, honorably, all the 
rights and authority of a mistress. 

Was that authority as great as has been commonly 
believed? De Maintenon probably had little 



2i8 New England Conscience 

power of initiative, but immense power of veto, 
an authority, however, which she by no means 
fully exercised. She was so careful, so diplomatic, 
so anxious not to make a single error in the tre- 
mendous game which she was playing, that she be- 
came overcautious, missing magnificent opportuni- 
ties. She came into power too late to stop the in- 
vasion of Holland; but she might have stayed the 
ravaging of the Palatinate ; and many lesser mistakes 
could have been prevented had she dared to risk 
an open quarrel with Louvois. It is plain that she 
saw the folly of pushing the Spanish claims ; but she 
realized that it would be humanly impossible to dis- 
suade his Most Christian Majesty from attempting 
to add Spain and Austria to his dominions. All that 
could be done was to mitigate the consequences of 
his rash ambition. 

In that worst blunder of Louis' long reign, how- 
ever, the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, this 
pious, wilful woman took a leading part. This med- 
dling in consciences and moulding of lives was just 
such work as Mme. de Maintenon liked. Moreover, 
so conspicuous an act of faith as this was the best 
possible advertisement of her power over the king, of 
her zeal in bringing him to serve the Church. But 
neither she nor the king had any conception of what 
the Revocation or the acts of persecution which led 
up to it implied. They were not cognizant of, they 
were incapable of comprehending, the details of en- 
forcement. Hedged in by courtiers and time-servers, 
they heard only the happy results of his Majesty's 
measures, never the story of how those measures 



Madame de Maintenon 2ig 



were carried out. The king repeatedly declared 
apainst the use of force, de Maintenon was fully sen- 
sible of the folly of gunpowder conversions ; but 
both were convinced that heresy is a disease ; whole- 
sale apostasy, therefore, did not in the least surprise 
them. If any one person may be held responsible 
for the senseless, infamous dragonnades, for the ban- 
ishing of some of the best blood of France, it is 
Louvois. Had he been honest with Louis, had it 
been possible for anyone to tell the truth to that 
old autocrat, it is probable that the king, perhaps 
even that the ultra-catholic de Maintenon, would 
have seen the folly, if not the wickedness, of the 
whole affair. But his Majesty had many early sins 
against the Church to atone for, — how better than 
by bringing all his erring sheep back to the fold 
of Rome? Mme. de Maintenon had piously under- 
taken to make a saint of this notorious sinner, — what 
clearer evidence of her zeal and its success than this 
fatherly, kingly care for the souls of his people? So 
the wTetched, blundering dismemberment of France 
went on ; and she, the woman who was an apostate 
from the faith of her fathers, whose religious activity 
had never flagged, who held the king's sceptre in 
her fine, soft hands, she was and is held mainly ac- 
countable. But on a question of faith in those days 
of religious hate and frenzy, who can rightly judge? 



